Of Vietnam

Of Vietnam
Identities in Dialogue
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
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
OF VIETNAM
© Jane Bradley Winston and Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier, 2001
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Of Vietnam : identities in dialogue / edited by Jane Bradley Winston and

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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, 1965-
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To our mothers,
Lucille McNeely Winston

and Kheng Khuot Ortiz.
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C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Projected Identities/Subversive Practices, 1

Jane Bradley Winston
After Zigzagging, Linh Dinh 17
Rap Music, Nguyen Quoc Chanh 19
Culinary Crossings and Disruptive Identities: Contesting Colonial 21

Categories in Everyday Life, Erica J. Peters
Moving along the Edge of Summer, Phan Huyen Thu 33
Cultural Encounters in French Colonial Literature, Patrick Laude 35
After Seven Days at a Hotel with T, Phan Nhien Hao 49
French Natural in the Vietnamese Highlands: 52

Nostalgia and Erasure in Montagnard Identity, Hjorleifur Jonsson
Orthotics for Easter, Nguyen Dang Thuong 67
A Cross-Cultural Context for Vietnamese and Vietnamese 69

American Writing, Renny Christopher
Saigon Pull, Linh Dinh 85
Welcome to America, Monique T. D.Truong 92
vi CONTENTS
“You Don’t Know This but I Keep Telling You”: Memory and 97
Disavowal in Monique Thuy-Dung Truong’s “Kelly,”
Karl Ashoka Britto
The Rivers Have Not Only Me, Van Cam Hai 109
Raindrops on Red Flags: Tran Trong Vu and the Roots

of Vietnamese Painting Abroad, Nora A.Taylor 112
City Streets 1, Hoang Hung 127
Fire, Andrew Lam 130
The Postcolonial Cinema of Lam Le: Screens, the Sacred, 143

and the Unhomely in Poussière d’Empire, Panivong Norindr
A Conversation with Linh Dinh, Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier 159
Tran Anh Hung’s Orphan Tales, Michèle Bacholle 170
A Worthy Résumé, Y Ban 181
A Conversation with Y Ban, Qui-Phiet Tran 189
Across Colonial Borders: Patriarchal Constraints and Vietnamese 193

Women in the Novels of Ly Thu Ho, Nathalie Nguyen
The Sparrows Fly across the Woods, Vo Thi Xuan Ha 211
A Conversation with Vo Thi Xuan Ha, Qui-Phiet Tran 219
Colonialism and Power in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, Jack A.Yeager 224
Morning Light, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud 237
Consuming Culture: Linda Lê’s Autofiction, Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier 241
Earth Cafeteria, Linh Dinh 252
Bibliography 257
Contributors 267
Index 273
A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

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 lit-
erature. 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 reso-
lution. 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 Lit-
erature 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.
I N T RO D U C T I O N

Projected Identities/Subversive Practices
Jane Bradley Winston
The events of the past two centuries have made “Vietnam” one of the early-
twenty-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 collec-
tive 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 rep-
resentations 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 pres-
ent, 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 fol-
lowing 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
2 Jane Bradley Winston
and war to shape public opinion and electoral practice, (how) do these con-
structs continue to function in our global and transnational era? Do they con-
tinue 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.

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 pres-
ence 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 Minis-
ter 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 propagan-
dizing 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 Ideol-
ogy in Architecture, Film, and Literature, re-shaping public opinion implies and per-
forms 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 South-
east 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 Tele-
vision’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 Apoc-
alypse 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
INTRODUCTION: PROJECTED IDENTITIES/SUBVERSIVE PRACTICES 3
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 dur-
ing 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 accu-
rate “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 his-
torical narrative structured around the Cold War categories, communist versus
noncommunist, and the “othering” of Ho Chi Minh as a staunch lifelong Com-
munist 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 capital-
ist aims. By 1958, “Indochina” was being used to silence colonial struggles and
enhance, in a neocolonial way, French culture’s niche on the emerging interna-
tional 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 ado-
lescent 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 Colo-
nial 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
American/Vietnam War (which the United States lost) in terms of French colo-
nial 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/neoim-
perialist pleasures by ingesting the French colonial imaginary and Viet-
namese/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 Cham-
pagne.
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 pro-
motions helped reinforce the recoding of “Vietnam” that led up to the twenty-
fifth 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 Viet-
nam. 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.
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 pre-
viously 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 inau-
gural 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 (cul-
tural) 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 produc-
ers 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 along-
side creative works, and cultural productions from Vietnam meet those of the
diaspora in their multiple forms: literature, film, art, and social practices. With-
out 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 iden-
tity. 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 Fran-
cophone literature, colonial and postcolonial studies into dialogue with art his-
torians and anthropologists, and it permits scholarly representations to dialogue
with visual art, photography, and creative works and interviews by artists, writ-
ers, 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 lin-
ear 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 sub-
vert 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
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 destabi-
lized the rigid hierarchies of traditional Vietnamese and French colonial soci-
eties.
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 anx-
ieties 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 imagi-
nary or scientific way, in fact form a sole literary genre, the “novel of accultur-
ation.” 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 rela-
tions 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 Cam-
bodia. 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 collabo-
ration, sycophancy, or attempted assimilation, novels of acculturation suggest that
one cannot borrow cultural practices without bringing along their philosophi-
cal 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 con-
straints suggests a range of associations in later French thought—Sartrean Exis-
tentialism’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 West-
ern 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 iden-
tity 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 his-
torical and political implications may reflect a lingering nostalgia for an Else-
where, 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 “deterri-
torialized identity,” he contends, it emerged only with the American War in
Vietnam and became real as it became part of the mediascape to which Viet-
nam 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, every-
day 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 prima-
rily 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 polit-
ical efficacy they would be well advised to consider.
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 tem-
porary. 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 eman-
cipation 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 ana-
lyzes Monique Thuy-Dung Truong’s story, “Kelly.” Truong’s story is set in the
same state whence, as Hjorleifur Jonsson showed, Montagnard identity is “pro-
jected”: 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 discrimi-
nations 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 sub-
ject 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 glob-
alize the identity of the Vietnamese artist or Vietnamese art production, global
trends have created “nations” within and outside of Southeast Asia that encour-
age/constrain Vietnamese artists in Vietnam and abroad to express a “national-
istic” 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 “interna-
tional” clientele. Recalling Jonsson’s view that Montagnard identity is defined
and projected from abroad, she argues that the global age identities of Viet-
namese 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 cri-
teria, the works featured in this standard-setting, identity-forming, and canon-
constructing 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 twentieth-
century. Where Christopher notes the ambiguities of Doi Moi-era writing, Tay-
lor 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 Viet-
namese art is not conducive to art, for it corresponds not to the desires or yearn-
ing 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-
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 per-
mit the exiled Vietnamese artist to have his work exhibited—racially or ethni-
cally 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 in-

between. 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 Viet-
nam 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 appar-
ently 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 Thuy-
Dung 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 “post-
colonial” 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 prob-
lems associated with globalization are closer to those Taylor links to art produc-
tion 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 spec-
tator 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 prac-
tices 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 cen-
tury, as Laude showed, French male authors of exotic and colonial fiction con-
structed 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 char-
acterized 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 pro-
jected? 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 immigra-
tion 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 conse-
quences of those roles for Asian women. On the borders between colonial cul-
tures, 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 writ-
ing 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 conse-
quences. Recalling other women writers of her era, Ly offers, in what Nguyen
considers her characteristic nonaggressive fashion, a countermodel—the prosti-
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 increas-
ingly 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 radi-
cal 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 colo-
nialism’s race-based hierarchical orderings. Weaving it into the fabric of Viet-
namese 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, por-
trayed a French male’s sexual encounter with an Asian woman and his trans-
gressive 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. Yea-
ger 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 Auto-
fiction” 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 con-
text 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 pro-
tagonist 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 play-
ful and ironic writing thus closes our critical selections by opening onto an
identity play reminiscent of the one Peters found in early-century cuisine. Fit-
tingly, 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 con-
struction of otherness” on which colonial (/imperialist) discourse relies (Homi
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 66), they subvert established and projected iden-
tities, blur categories, interrogate the very fabric of (their) identities, and engage
processes that might perhaps create different, more fluid identities. Putting iden-
tities in play, and putting the pleasure into their identity play, they create transi-
tory alliances, loosely collective, mutable identities across former colonial
categories and their multiple divides. If slave narratives and Third World testi-
monials permit “the public” to read and “congratulate itself on becoming inter-
ested 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-twentieth-
century 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 ques-
tion, 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 endeav-
oring 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, dis-
placement, 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
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. Writ-
ers 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.
After Zigzagging

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

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

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, politi-
cians proclaimed the virtues of colonialism with idealistic phrases such as “the
civilizing mission” and the promise of “assimilation.” But the French govern-
ment 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 dis-
couraged all informal interactions and cooperation between colonizer and col-
onized, 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 inferi-
ors, but social divisions also helped reduce the possibility of French people sym-
pathizing 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,
22 Erica J. Peters
serving dishes together that seemed incompatible. They subverted French colo-
nial 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 colo-
nizers.
In this essay I do not treat “identity” as a fixed attribute, nor as if it were cho-
sen 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 high-
light 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 asso-
ciated 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-
CULINARY CROSSINGS AND DISRUPTIVE IDENTITIES 23
ity to afford expensive imported foods, at the same time as they pleased the col-
onizing 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 assimila-

tionist rhetoric back in the metropole, the colonizers in Vietnam did not want
the Vietnamese to become more like the French. On the contrary, they com-
plained 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 admin-
istrator 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 colo-
nizer from colonized, and cross-cultural adaptations threatened the clarity of that
distinction.
While the French avoided stating explicitly that they did not want Viet-
namese 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 com-
plaint: “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 eat-
ing 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
24 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 Viet-

nam, gave his own banquet and hired a French caterer to serve his guests a vari-
ety 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 consid-
ered 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 claim-
ing 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 daugh-
ter 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 Viet-
namese 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 Viet-
nam, 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 (deli-
cious 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 men-
tion 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
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 iden-
tity 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 reluc-
tant 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 culi-
nary tastes and competencies for a variety of audiences. Throughout the colo-
nial period, the hosts of most Vietnamese weddings served elaborate Vietnamese
dishes. In 1908, for instance, one wedding banquet included delicate rice pas-
tries, elaborately spiced vegetable dishes, and piglets roasted until crisp (Dürrwell
8). At a high society wedding of a Vietnamese bride and groom in 1911, how-
ever, the father of the bride, Le Phat Thanh, ignored the Vietnamese conven-
tions. 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 dis-
dained”—again, no foods were mentioned that sounded even slightly Viet-
namese.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 wed-
ding 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-
26 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 cham-
pagne 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 adminis-
trator 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, mark-
ing 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 adap-
tation: 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 famil-
ial 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 Viet-
namese 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
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 con-
tradiction by pointing out that the French did not in fact want Vietnamese co-
workers. 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, Viet-
namese children who learned to eat French food were also playing with identi-
ties 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 chil-
dren 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 ele-
mentary 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 Euro-
pean foods (Leurence 1).22 Newspaper advertisements provide richly textured
evidence of the increase in French food purchases. European alcohol and ciga-
rette companies had advertised in Vietnamese-language newspapers such as Gia
Dinh Báo since at least the 1890s. By 1910 Luc Tinh Tân Van included advertise-
ments in Vietnamese for a French bakery that offered “delicacies made in the
Parisian manner.”23 In 1915, the “Petite Fermière” brand of canned milk adver-
tised 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 cof-
fee, French biscuits, Nestlé brand milk, and even French diet pills.24 These tar-
28 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 Viet-

namese to maintain a distinct, unchanging, “traditional” diet. By instead creat-
ing 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 dif-
ferent 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 dis-
cussed 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 self-
importance of those who moved to the cities. The different regions offered
vastly different opportunities. Could people from such varied backgrounds cre-
ate 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
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:
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 cen-
ter. [ . . . ] [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 nos-
talgia” (My 171-172).
Michel My wrote in French, for a largely if not predominantly French audi-
ence; nevertheless, the impression left is that he felt able to experiment with the
various cuisines available under colonialism, and assigning him a culinary iden-
tity 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 Viet-
nam, and most Vietnamese people could not even have imagined his experi-
ences. 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
30 Erica J. Peters
neutral. French Vietnam was a rapidly changing society where people struggled
daily over issues of colonial legitimacy and authority. Under these circum-
stances, all small-scale cultural adaptations (and sometimes even the absence or
refusal of adaptation) could be identity claims. Such claims allow us to add com-
plexity 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 prac-
tices. And new subversive identities emerged, as Vietnamese of different back-
grounds assessed their strength against the structures of colonial society.
I have argued that one way for the Vietnamese to delegitimize colonial author-
ity 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 Viet-
namese 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 ris-
ing 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 Representa-
tion,” 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 Lieutenant-
Governor 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
with the French since their conquest of southern Vietnam. On his daughter’s engagement, see
La Semaine Coloniale (Saigon), September 19, 1896, 2.
12. On Do Huu Phuong’s banquets, see also Doumer, L’Indo-Chine française: Souvenirs, 67.
13. L’Opinion (Saigon), January 27, 1911, 2.
14. 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).
15. 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).

16. 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).
17. Canned milk had been advertised in the French press since at least the 1880s. In 1915 one com-
pany (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.
18. On the perceived importance of the betel nut in Vietnamese culture, see the folk tale “Le Bétel
et l’Aréquier,” 175-190.
19. For an analysis of the grammar of French cuisine, see Fischler, L’Homnivore, 32-37.
20. Just returned from France, the title character refuses to speak Vietnamese and calls French cui-
sine the best in the world (Nam Xuong 294).
21. L’Avenir du Tonkin, July 15, 1885, 2-3. For a discussion of the intergenerational dynamics of Viet-
namese radicals, see Tai 52-56.
22. 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 civil-
isation, 420 and 435.
23. Luc Tinh Tân Van, November 3, 1910, unnumbered page: “Dô mi vi làm theo cách nu công bên
Paris.”
24. Luc Tinh Tân Van, January 7, 1915, 8; April 1, 1915, 3; May 6, 1915, 3; and October 20, 1920.
25. See, for instance, Diguet, Annamites, 54 and Langlet, Le Peuple Annamite, 92.
26. In 1913 workers’ diet had not improved, and day-laborers spent no more than ten cents a day
on food. (Langlet 98.)
Moving along the Edge of Summer

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.
Cultural Encounters in French Colonial Literature

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” lit-
eratures 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 “scien-
tific” exploration of native realities; an exploration that is at the core of the colo-
nial 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 psychologi-
cal and social means of a quest for “scientific” knowledge and a deliberate chal-
lenge to Western norms of understanding. It may be underpinned by the
motivations and orientations captured in both “exotic” and “colonial” litera-
ture, 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-
36 Patrick Laude
tioning of the very notion of civilization, for instance, and attempts to “inte-
grate” or “assimilate” the other through knowledge may result in a cultural “dis-
integration” of a French male character. Indeed, where the French were
concerned, the experience of the other that is highlighted by this type of accul-
turation frequently takes the form of a transgressive acculturation and a repudi-
ation of European civilizational models.
Such occurrences highlight a fundamental threat to the French colonial iden-

tity, and, beyond it, articulate a profound and powerful challenge to the Weltan-
schauung 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 Euro-
pean 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 mean-
ings: 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 Bau-
denne 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 particu-
larly 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.
CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS IN FRENCH COLONIAL LITERATURE 37
By sexualizing the native female, these narratives suggest its phantasmatic
foundations, cultural allures, ideological implications, and fundamental ambigu-
ities. Indeed, as a narrative and imaginary figure of the colonial context, the
Southeast Asian woman introduces, embodies, and recapitulates the entire imag-
inary 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 char-

acter 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 other-
ness. 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 civi-
lizational 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 per-
ceived from a quasi-ethnographic perspective. To foster this sense of “scientific”
objectivity and to give credit to its “colonial” qualifications, Pouvourville situ-
ates the narrative unfolding within the larger context of Vietnamese cultural
mores and norms. This setting characterizes an approach that favors a quasi-
ethnographic 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 hus-
band 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,
38 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. Con-
sistently, they portray the encounter of an Asian female and French male as moti-
vated 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 charac-
ter 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 con-
gaie, 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 senti-
mental 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 gen-
uine cultural curiosity, let alone of a desire for cultural exchange on the part of
either character. Although their interaction is generally harmonious, the narra-
tive highlights the cultural gap separating them. Suggestively illustrating the lim-
its 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, how-
ever, 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 accul-
turating influence on the part of Thi Sao.4 In the same way, the existential seren-
ity and abandonment to sickness and death into which his cultural choice leads
Jeanpierre reflects metaphysical and moral taedium vitae rather than cross-cultural
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 hol-
low 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 liter-
ature 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 colo-
nial 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 myste-
rious 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 nov-
els, 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 com-
plications, 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 har-
monious and curvilinear shape of her shoulders and breasts to the dignified sim-
plicity 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-
40 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 charac-

ter’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 dis-
simulating female whose merely apparent submission masks a resilient secret
resistance to her “master.” Moreover, these novels portray all real communica-
tion 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 com-
munion. 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 lit-
erature. 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” coun-
terpart, 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
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 cul-
tural gap that could have separated her from her lover. Throughout the story,

her dual cultural status provides the catalyst and medium of a cultural transfor-
mation 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 clas-
sify 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 Euro-
pean 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 prac-
tice 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 psycho-
logical 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 sup-
planted by marital functions. Accordingly, Rollin’s first Cambodian wife, Kâm-
lang, 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
42 Patrick Laude
social level: it is grounded in a metaphysical notion of universality that super-
sedes 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 char-

acter, 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 sus-
pension 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 recrimi-
nations: the reality of the moment, life so full of itself that thought cannot pen-
etrate 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 him-
self 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 psy-
chological conditioning; a de facto break from his original psychological struc-
tures 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 avail-
ability, with the words of a traditional and choral love song. That song elaborates
an understanding of human sexuality whose sensual and poetical directness con-
trasts 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 non-
chalantly 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.
Nature and Pre-Industrial Lifestyles

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 aware-
ness 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 prac-
tices. 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 pre-
ferred 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 colo-
nization.9 This cultural strategy is inversely analogous to the approach used by
44 Patrick Laude
early-twentieth-century young Asian intellectuals, who understood the acquisi-
tion of European knowledge and methods as a means of using the colonizer’s
own weapons against him and ultimately liberating oneself from colonial tute-
lage. 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 bat-
tle. 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 South-
east 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 charac-
teristics and motivations are highlighted, indeed symbolized, by the only feature
that distinguishes his dwelling from a traditional Vietnamese abode—the con-
spicuous 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 Con-
fucian tradition, Baly’s ancestral altar was empty” (Pouvourville, Le cinquième
bonheur, 199). Isolated as an individual who has chosen to join a family that can-
not 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 efflu-
via 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 trans-
gression” that is staged might be less a philosophical “conversion” than a liter-
ary 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-
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 implica-

tions. 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 aware-
ness 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 acknowl-
edged: the moral fruits of this recognition include one’s abandonment to the
rhythms and demands of nature, a smiling and debonair passivity, and a height-
ened 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 pas-
sive decay. In Sao Tiampa, the protagonist Vébaud’s contacts with Buddhist
monks are for the most part disappointing. These religious figures only repro-
duce 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 Bud-
dhism. 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 Bud-
dhist 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 insub-
stantiality.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 tra-
ditional life, this happiness is hardly considered in its profoundly spiritual dimen-
sion, 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 ).
46 Patrick Laude
Ultimately, Groslier and Billotey envisage Buddhist contemplatives from
within the perspective of their own respective ideological metaphors: the ele-
mentary 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 archi-
tecture, 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 per-
ception, 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 alter-
ity 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 contradic-
tory aspirations of a European vision that has no principle of cohesiveness other
than its will for expansive power and individualistic claims of happiness. Colo-
nialism and primitivist idealism are two sides of one cultural unease. The aspi-
rations 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.
Notes
1. Let us note that French female characters are never portrayed—to my knowledge—as experi-
encing 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 per-
taining 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 sensa-
tion 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 exterioriza-
tions 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” (Cas-
seville 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 dexter-
ity that she displays in this capacity prove that her mother and all her ancestors, and all the ances-
tors 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 understand-
ing 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 leav-
ing 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 vivify-
ing 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).
48 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 agi-
tation” (Baudenne 72).
After Seven Days at a Hotel With T

Phan Nhien Hao
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
50 Phan Nhien Hao
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
French Natural in The Vietnamese Highlands:
Nostalgia and Erasure in Montagnard Identity*

Hjorleifur Jonsson
For the highlanders, man and society are embedded in nature and depend-
ent 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, repro-
duce, and readapt to whatever changes man, nature, and the cosmic forces
might impinge on it. This evolutionary process resulted in some social-
structural 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 num-
ber 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 53
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 pejora-
tive 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 colo-
nial administration, and that the use of the term tended to naturalize the colo-
nial 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, Viet-
nam 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 hin-
terland 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 Inter-
national2 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 col-
lectively 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 popula-
tions 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
54 Hjorleifur Jonsson
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 major-
ity 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 High-
lands 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 (barbar-
ians [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 com-
mon in references to peoples of the Central Highlands.7 The reason Montag-
nard 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 rou-
tinization8 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 Montag-
nard or more commonly Yard(s) was one of the kinds of people that the Amer-
ican forces encountered and dealt with.
By the time the American forces fighting the feared global spread of com-
munism replaced the French colonial effort to hold on to Indochina, the high-
land 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 sug-
gests 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 sim-
ply 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-
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 “Montag-
nard” 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 con-
cerns kinship imagery, bravery, and human caring and camaraderie, the state-
ment carefully avoids mentioning the implied common enemy, the contemporary
authorities of Vietnam:
I would venture to suggest, based on my own experiences, that Montag-

nard is used in an affectionate and praiseworthy manner by the vast major-
ity 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 dimen-
sions 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 peo-
ple.10 The label “Montagnard” is an ideal example of such dynamics of deterri-
torialized 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-
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 anal-
ogy and set within a French colonial context:
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 folk-
lore, 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 Montag-
nards 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, leav-
ing 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 Mon-
tagnard 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 pro-
duction 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 ten-
dency 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
and reaffirmed by a global political economy which insert a hierarchy of
difference in our post-colonial world.11
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 popula-
tions of the Central Highlands as an administrative collectivity, and both mis-
sionaries 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 hinter-
land 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 real-
ity 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 iden-
tities 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 vari-
ations 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
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:
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 polit-
ical, 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 lan-
guages, and important civilizations.19
Describing the way mountain people were perceived by their lowland neigh-
bors, 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 sar-
casm 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 pro-
vide a firm reference to counter assumptions about one-dimensional under-
standings 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 Euro-
pean 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.
Because of the different politics of nation-building in Europe and colonial
management in Indochina, the outcomes would have differed even if Montag-
nard 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 early-
twentieth-century French debates on policy and practice in the Central High-
lands 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 ful-
fill 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 col-
onized 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 politi-
cal configurations in French Indochina is erased with the notion of Montag-
nards as somehow naturally of Vietnamese space.
My examination of the reality of the term Montagnard offers neither an affir-
mation 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 relation-
ships.
Precolonial Structures and Identities, Postcolonial Debates

The possibility remains that Montagnard identity, like Pemsien, is simply a colonial-
era construction that obfuscates the more fundamental reality of the “highlander
world” that Hickey portrays,29 and which I quoted at the beginning of this arti-
cle. 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’ appel-
lations for people who stand outside the state, and the terms have various asso-
ciations 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 peo-
ples outside the realms of state rule. In general, these lowlander terms for hin-
terland (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 them-
selves 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 peo-
ples 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 repro-
duced the structures that emanated from the state. These state-projects relate to
the reproduction of highlander worlds in a fundamental way, in that shifting cul-
tivation 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 main-
tained 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 particu-
lar boundaries and histories of Vietnam, and toward more regional understand-
ings.
The distinction between “tribal” and “peasant” populations is a standard ref-
erence in the ethnography of Southeast Asia. Rather than taking this distinction
as indicating separate and independent adaptations to the environment, I pro-
pose 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 cat-
egories 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 pro-
ceeded to promote the expansion of wet-rice cultivation, they made wet-rice
cultivators subjects of the state and by default dry-rice cultivators became non-
subjects and stood outside the state. As the practices of states were routinized,
their rulers promoted spatial understandings that defined the court as the cen-
ter of the civilized world, and they assigned identities to individuals and groups
in terms of their relationship to the court and its religious establishments. Draw-
ing 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,
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 peo-
ple 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 eco-

nomic 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 moti-
vation 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 north-
ern 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 auton-
omy to these non-subject clients, are now ethnic identities within nation-
states.40 The precolonial notion of hinterland peoples, both through ethnic labels
and a generic category of “savages,” was part of the state’s civilizational dis-
course. 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, chang-
ing 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 moun-
tains 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
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 his-
tory 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, 1992-
94), 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 dis-
cussion 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
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).
7. 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).

8. I use the terms “routinize” (v) and “routinization” (n) in relation to identities such as Montag-
nard 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 cur-
rency 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 contin-
gent. In this way, identities become “real” through routinization.
9. For a discussion, see MacAlister, “Mountain Minorities and the Viet Minh.” While some uplan-
ders 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.
10. Appadurai, Modernity at Large. See also Gupta and Ferguson, eds., Culture, Power, Place for a dis-
cussion of these issues.
11. Mee, “National Difference and Global Citizenship,” 252.
12. See Salemink, “Mois and Maquis;” Salemink, “Primitive Partisans;” and Salemink, “Ethnography
as Martial Art.”
13. 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).
14. See Greenwood, “Castilians, Basques, and Andalusians.”
15. 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” (“proto-
Indochinoise”) in reference to the “very ancient stock” (“le stock humain culturellement plus
archaïque”) of contemporary cultures in the hinterlands from Burma to Vietnam (Condomi-
nas, “The Mnong Gar of Central Vietnam,” 17). The “Indochina” of the term is from the ref-
erence 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 neu-
tral 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 attempt-
ing 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.
16. 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
Greenwood, “Castilians, Basques, and Andalusians,” for an insightful discussion of historical shifts
in identity politics.
17. 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.
18. 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.
19. 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.
20. Braudel, The Mediterranean, 46.
21. See Caro-Baroja, “The city and the country.”
22. 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).
23. See Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885-1925 (chapter 4).
24. Salemink, “Mois and Maquis,” 255.
25. See Lewis, Neither Wolf Nor Dog (chapter 1).
26. Salemink, “Mois and Maquis,” 256.
27. For Bali, see Robinson, The Dark Side of Paradise (chapter 2).
28. See Goscha, Vietnam or Indochina? Contesting Concepts of Space in Vietnamese Nationalism.
29. See Hickey, “Some Aspects of Hill Tribe Life in Vietnam;” Hickey, Sons of the Mountains; and
Hickey, Shattered World.
30. Hickey, Sons of the Mountains, 2.
31. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region, 110.
32. Hickey, Sons of the Mountains, 83.
33. 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.”
34. For this view, see Chaudhuri, Asia Before Europe (220).
35. See Peter and Sally Kunstadter, “Population Movements and Environmental Changes in the Hills
of Northern Thailand.”
36. See Braudel, On History.
37. Braudel, On History, 31 and 52.
38. See Jonsson, “Cultural Priorities and Projects;” and Jonsson, “Yao Minority Identity.”
39. 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.”
40. See Jonsson, “Yao Minority Identity.”
41. See Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma.
42. See Jonsson, “Cultural Priorities.”
43. See Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina.
Orthotics for Easter

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
A Cross-Cultural Context for Vietnamese and
Vietnamese American Writing

Renny Christopher
And now, many years after the end of the war, many Americans are still dis-
cussing, pondering over the Vietnam War, with nearly 7,000 books pub-
lished on this topic. This shows that the American people are a responsible
nation, seriously trying to draw lessons from past experience in order to for-
mulate 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 Social-
ist 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 Amer-
icans 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
70 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:Viet-
namese 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 cross-
cultural 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 per-
manent 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 assim-
ilation. 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 support-
ers 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 “polit-
ical 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-
A CROSS-CULTURAL CONTEXT 71
ting” the history of war in Asia and adopting the national historical narra-
tive that disavows the existence of an American imperial project. (Lowe,
Immigrant Acts, 27)
However, the new English-language and translated works by Vietnamese Amer-

icans 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 trans-
lated 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 Viet-
namese who fought for the National Liberation Front and Democratic Repub-
lic 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 com-
monalities, 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 con-
temporary 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 repre-
sented in its stories and the cultural differences that emerge from a close exam-
ination of the three groups of writers it represents—Euro-American, Vietnamese
American, and Vietnamese.
The Other Side of Heaven

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’ percep-
tions 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 recog-
nition 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 Viet-
namese, for instance. It shares this recognition of commonality between former
enemies, this sense of having been formed in the same conflict, with the “liter-
ature 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 similar-
ities 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
winning side. Of these Euro-American and Viet Kieu similarities, the most sig-
nificant is found in the emotional reactions of characters, who are often con-
sumed 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 Viet-
namese 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 dur-
ing 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-educa-
tion 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
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 char-
acter, 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 conver-
sation 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 sub-
merged 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, poi-
son, and vicious sadism” in his own soul, to play themselves out. He is, after all,
a boxer, and, at least in this story, that occupation figures the glorification of vio-
lence for its own sake. After the Pugilist receives a head injury in a boxing match
and starts suffering blackouts, he changes:
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 biologi-
cal (“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 pro-
ductive function.
In this anthology, Xuan Thieu’s “Please Don’t Knock on the Door” imme-
diately 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, how-
ever, 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
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 pos-
sible for writers to openly criticize their society without being branded as dis-
sidents. 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 compli-
cated. 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 por-
traits 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 crit-
ical 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 fore-
most 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
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 con-
sumed by a will to violence. Rather, protagonists in Bao Ninh’s “Wandering
Souls,” Nguyen Quang Thieu’s “Two Village Women,” Le Luu’s “The Ruck-

sack,” and Xuan Thieu’s “Please Don’t Knock on My Door,” tend to experi-
ence 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 capri-
cious 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 anthol-
ogy, by Vietnamese and American writers alike, encourage us to take the pres-
ence 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 Bro-
gan’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 oth-
ers 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
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 Viet-
namese 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 hus-
band entwined in a curse whose elaborate intricacies wearied her” (297).
Clearly, the legacy of the war haunts Brian and Mary, who interprets that haunt-
ing 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 exis-
tence 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, Blanken-
ship 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 nar-
rate 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).
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 for-
get 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. Sym-
bolically, 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 acci-
dent 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 envi-
ronment, 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 Viet-
namese ghosts in Lap’s story choose to love rather than to torment their sur-
viving 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 com-
rades. 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 real-
ity 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 sto-
ries of the dead is a metaphorical attempt to call them by name, so that the liv-
ing 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
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 dimen-
sion 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 dis-
honestly 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 rep-
resents the war. Indeed, the image of the skeleton crouching in the rafters, laugh-
ing, 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 bil-
lion 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 mem-
ory 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-
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. Accord-
ing 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 chil-
dren. 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-
spectives and more sophisticated views concerning the commonalities and dif-
ferences in American and Vietnamese perspectives on the war and the post-war
future. It suggests that the remarkably univocal post-war discourse in this coun-
try might finally begin to change in ways that will produce more nuanced cul-
tural 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, unac-

knowledged way: all assumed that the war had been primarily, even exclusively,
“about” America and Americans. The Other Side of Heaven effectively and elo-
quently 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 Viet-
nam 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 mid-
1990s. 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 writ-
ers 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 num-
ber.
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
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.
11. 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 com-
munity . . . 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 Con-
necticut State University in November 2000. Proceeds from the book go to support a medical
clinic in Hue (Karlin, personal communication).
12. 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.
13. Personal (e-mail) communication, Karlin, April 21, 1997.
14. Personal communication, Karlin.
15. 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.
16. I am indebted to discussions with Karlin for this last idea about “Tony D.”
17. 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. propa-
ganda, 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.
Saigon Pull

Linh Dinh
Across a narrow lake from my house in the center of Hanoi is a hideous-

looking 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 morn-
ing. 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 emo-
tional 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,
86 Linh Dinh
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?”
SAIGON PULL 87
“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 look-
ing 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 state-
ment! 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 morn-
ing, 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 knowl-
edge 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 dark-
complexioned. 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,
88 Linh Dinh
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 mos-
quito 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 discov-
ered 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 sol-
diers 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 lit-
tle 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.
SAIGON PULL 89
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 Bulgar-
ian 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 war-
fare. 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?
Protest in front of Truong Van Tran’s video store, Westminster, California, March 1999. Photographer: Jerry Gorman.
Welcome to America

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 fab-
rics, 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 excur-
sion, stubbornly.
For three of those years, I had even worked in a high-rise bordering on Bat-
tery 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 fol-
low-through, that is always complicated. I enter into these one-size-fits-all nar-
ratives 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,
WELCOME TO AMERICA 93
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 antic-
ipation, 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 plat-
form 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 bewil-
dered, 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 rider-
ship, 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, ten-
sion crowds into each car.
It took me a while to realize that it did not matter whether the words them-
selves 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 fre-
netic, clarion call.
This is when it all begins to happen.
Those tourists who understand English and who can understand the message
94 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 work-
ers, 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 sud-
den realization that they have entered into this journey with inadequate infor-
mation, 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 counter-
parts, temporarily out of uniform but still exuding the smell of starch and dry-
cleaning 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 fol-
lowed by friendly chit chat of the kind that usually does not thrive in the sub-
ways 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 identi-
fying 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 selec-
tion 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.
WELCOME TO AMERICA 95
Moving beneath the streets of this city in a silvery encapsulation of this coun-
try, 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 sec-
tion, making exaggerated creases in the Arts & Leisure, waving my red flag of lit-
eracy, 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 sur-
face, setting off a thousand floating flashbulbs. The seagulls are keeping speed
with the ferry, flying above our heads, showing off their white undersides. Man-
hattan 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 impro-
vised, 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
96 Monique T. D.Truong
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.
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 sta-

tions nationwide on July 4, 2000. The commissioning of this work was made
possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
“You Don’t Know This but I Keep Telling You”:
Memory and Disavowal in

Monique Thuy-Dung Truong’s “Kelly”
Karl Ashoka Britto
How do Vietnamese American authors attempt to write against a national nar-

rative 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 child-
hood 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 let-
ter as an epistolary text linking together two individuals with very different rela-
tionships 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 lac-
erated 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 land-
scape:
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
98 Karl Ashoka Britto
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)
The “bond” referred to by Thuy Mai is one of a shared history of ostracism aris-

ing 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 rib-
bons . . . the Beths and the Susans [who] wore pink and never bulged and buck-
led 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 sham-
poo 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 exclu-
sionary 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 intergen-
erational 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 Amer-
ican landscape seen through the distorted lens of Hollywood’s exported fan-
tasies, 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
YOU DON’T KNOW THIS BUT I KEEP TELLING YOU 99
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 sear-
ing 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 Har-
bor? . . . 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 Har-
bor. (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 natural-
izes 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 con-
struct 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 immi-
grant 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 pow-
erful 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 evo-
cation 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 Boil-
ing 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
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 speci-
ficity with which she situates her arrival in the summer of 1975—a period dur-
ing 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 peda-
gogical 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 narra-

tor’s few friends within that classroom, a white female student named
Kelly. Although the classroom is remembered as a site of pain, the retro-
spective renarration of that pain, not as individually suffered, but as a shared
topos between writer and addressee, is in contrast a source of new pleas-
ure 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 peda-
gogy 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
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 over-
weight 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 shat-
tered by Kelly’s racist gaze than by that of Mrs. Hammerick. The young Viet-
namese 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 ren-
dered 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 con-
text 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
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 iden-
tification 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 oppo-
sition 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 Jen-
nifer’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 high-
lights intersubjective communication and exchange, and the experience of read-
ing 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 commu-
nication 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 indi-
cation 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 strik-
ing 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
party includes a moment where the gaze between Kelly and Thuy Mai is mutu-
ally, 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 canon-
ical 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 Amer-
ican writers.
“Despite widespread disagreement on many other theoretical issues,” Wong
writes, “students of the double are remarkably consistent on one point: the cen-
tral 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 considera-
tion 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 can-
not in itself account for the full range of circumstances underlying the forma-
tion 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 “antiso-
cial tendencies,” have never been neutral or unmarked. American minori-
ties 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.
The psychological dynamics at work in the relationship between the marginal-
ized 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 lit-
erary 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 Amer-
ican 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 vic-
tim. . . . 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 differ-
ence, 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” pre-
cisely 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 suc-
cessful assimilation.
How might this discussion of the double in Asian American literature illumi-
nate 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 Amer-
ican?
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
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 sub-
sequent 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 struc-
ture 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 occa-
sionally 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 dif-
ferent 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 insis-
tence 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
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
When Vietnamese American authors are allowed to participate in the construc-

tion of American cultural memory, Truong remarks in an essay on Vietnamese
American literature, their texts run the risk of being transformed into “frag-
ments 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 mis-
recognition and disavowal that threaten Vietnamese Americans of Truong’s gen-
eration. 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 ‘unliv-
able’ 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, Japan-
ese, 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 con-
flations 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 ques-
tion 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
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 mis-
citation appears both in Lowe’s Immigrant Acts chapter and in an earlier version published as an
essay in The Ethnic Canon (63).
6. Given the racial distinctions that structure life in Boiling Spring, the colors evoked in this pas-
sage 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 integra-
tion, but also as one that recuperates yellowness from the abject realm represented by the pile of

dirt mentioned in the passage discussed above.
7. Writing about “Kelly,” Truong herself has emphasized the lack of clear reciprocity in the epis-
tolary 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).
8. 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).
9. The authors figuring most prominently in Wong’s analysis are Maxine Hong Kingston, Monica
Sone, Lonny Kaneko, Ashley Sheun Dunn, and David Henry Hwang.
10. 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).
11. 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).
The Rivers Have Not Only Me

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

Nora A. Taylor
Recent arguments concerning the influence of globalization and postnational-

ism in Southeast Asia have concluded that local cultural expressions are now
irreversibly outward-looking and that the nation no longer holds the signifi-
cance 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 paint-
ing 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 Viet-
nameseness 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 partic-
ular, has chosen to speak up and speak out about the burden of being Viet-
namese 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 113
and sheets of rain. His works are about what it means to be Asian and Viet-
namese 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 defini-
tions?
The Vietnamese Art Market

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 Viet-
namese 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 mar-
ket and gave incentives to individual entrepreneurs to start businesses and chal-
lenge the state monopoly on the production of goods. Doi Moi policies also led
to loosened governmental control over artistic and cultural modes of produc-
tion. 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 estab-
lishment 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. Reminis-
cent 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 “Viet-
namese” painting. As I have pointed out elsewhere, these imaginings of Vietnam
through the medium of paint legitimate Vietnam as an “exotic” Asian travel des-
tination, which outsiders are invited to perceive as permanently located in a
romantic idealized past that no longer exists in the eyes of the Vietnamese them-
selves.4 While the foreign clientele has been shaping the kind of art that is pro-
duced 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 mar-
ket. 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, con-
temporary art historians continue to assess Vietnamese art on the basis of its
ability to portray that which is Vietnamese about Vietnamese art. Albeit some-
114 Nora A.Taylor
what vague, Vietnameseness is loosely defined in art as an expression of the pur-
portedly “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 ensur-
ing that artists reap all the economic benefits from the international interests.
Because they are no longer part of the art community within Vietnam, Viet-
namese 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 dias-
pora 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 paint-
ing 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 Blos-
soms 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. Dur-
ing 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-
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 rel-
ative 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 exhibi-
tion, 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 serendip-
itously, 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 infor-
mant’s ‘taste,’ connections or preferences.”8 At the same time, however, the
Plum Blossoms catalogue also had unexpectedly positive consequences. It sin-
gle-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 for-
eign 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 gal-
leries 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
116 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 roman-
ticized 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 Viet-
nam, 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 be-
cause they captured Vu’s own longing for his homeland. Perhaps they looked
“French” because he may have been unconsciously influenced by French paint-
ing 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 epit-
omize Vietnam from an artist who was consciously rejecting his background.
Captivated by stories of starving artists and repressed genius, buyers of Viet-

namese 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 Viet-
nam 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 real-
ized 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 writ-
ers 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
118 Nora A.Taylor
the center of so much controversy that his political life has been well docu-
mented 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 writ-
ings; 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 toi-
let 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 West-
ern 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 fol-
low 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 purchas-
ing 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
Figure 1. Tran Trong Vu, “La Chambre Pluviale,” Installation (Photo: Courtesy of the artist)]
120 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 refer-
ences 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 ref-
erence 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 inter-
national 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 pic-
torial 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 sen-
tence 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 mech-
anism, 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
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.
stereotype of Asians as constantly smiling. His use of this figure recalls the paint-
ing 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. Cre-
ating 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 cate-

gories. His critique refers us to his own situation: an Asian in Europe, he is clas-
sified 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, lit-
erally 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 Docu-
ment” 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 fash-
ion 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 mean-
ingless when one is not ethnically French in France. This is precisely the situa-
tion 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 identi-
ties as “Vietnamese artists” than do the state or the increasingly influential art
galleries. The nation is considered an important axis of identity by artists work-
ing within standards applied since the 1950s by governing arts organizations in
124 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 blind-
folded. 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 Viet-
namese 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 Viet-
namese 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 center-
periphery 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
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 def-
initions within the global art world.
Notes
1. See Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large.
2. See Wendy Mee, “National Difference and Global Citizenship.”
3. The Vietnamese women’s national dress consisting of a long tunic worn over trousers.
4. See Nora Taylor, “‘Pho’ Phai and Faux Phais.”
5. For a discussion on the concept of national identity in Vietnamese, see Nora Taylor, “The Artist
and the State.”
6. See Grant Kester, “The Art of Listening (and of Being Heard).”
7. See Jeffrey Hantover, Uncorked Soul.
8. Personal communication, 1995.
9. 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.
10. Personal communication, Nguyen Quan, January 1993.
11. See Nora Taylor, “‘Pho’ Phais and Faux Phai.”
12. See Panivong Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina. For an interesting analysis of tourism and the nos-
talgia for the war, see Laurel Kennedy and Wendy Williams, “Re-Presenting Vietnam.”
13. Anonymous art buyer, Hanoi, 1993.
14. 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.
15. 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.”
16. Conversation with Tran Trong Vu, June 1999.
17. My translation of: “Toi buoc di. Khong thay pho. Khong thay nha. Chi thay mua sa tren mau
co do.”
18. Similarly, Bui Xuan Phai paintings of rainy Hanoi streets had been viewed as too sad for the gen-
eral mood of socialist nation building and not sunny enough for the country that the party was
promoting.
19. See Apinan Poshyananda, “Roaring Tigers, Desperate Dragons in Transition.”
20. For an interesting analysis of Vietnamese nationals living in France, see Gisèle Bousquet, Beyond
the Bamboo Hedge.
21. See Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large.
City Streets 1

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

Andrew Lam
Mister Cao’s Oolong tea from Guangdong was wasted that woeful Thanksgiv-
ing 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 blos-
somed 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 sep-
tanarian 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 wait-
ing 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-
FIRE 131
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.

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 morn-
ing 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 sup-
portive 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 dark-
ness that has befallen my country. May my death reveal to the civilized
world the evil of the communist ideology and godless demons who con-
tinue to drink the blood of my people.
I wish you all a healthy, peaceful and prosperous life.
Good-bye,
Nguyen Hoai Bac.”
132 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 sor-
rowful 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 Mis-
ter 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, for-
gotten 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 lit-
erature on the subject, and a few shoppers even posed with us for photographs.
FIRE 133
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 trade-
mark “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, Ameri-
cans 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 com-
mitted 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 any-
one here, uhm, speak about this?”
What the American reporter heard next was a collective groan. I, for one,
134 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 gos-
sip 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 seri-
ousness. 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 Viet-
namese 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 coun-
tries 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 characteris-
tic 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 sac-
rifice. 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
FIRE 135
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 intermit-
tently 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 fol-
low 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 para-
trooper’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
136 Andrew Lam
let us go sacrifice our
lives under the flag.
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 wait-
ers 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 any-
one 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, oth-
ers 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 neces-
sary.”
The vixen! Oh, how my heart jumped. I nearly dropped my hat. Absent-
mindedly, 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 hand-
some face and instead of helping me up, he grabbed another chair and sat him-
self 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
FIRE 137
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 remem-
bered that the media and Congress and their staff were already gone, that Capi-

tol 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 edi-
torial 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 fol-
lowed 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 dis-
agreed 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.
138 Andrew Lam
“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 commu-
nity. 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: Genera-
tional 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 dash-
board 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. Lis-
ten 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,
FIRE 139
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 bil-
lowing 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 walk-
ing. 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 fire-
place 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 break-
ing 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, win-
dows, 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 unset-
tled mind, I saw Mister Bac as in a newsreel, swirling in slow motion, cocooned
140 Andrew Lam
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., car-
ried 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 indecipher-
able 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 feel-
ing 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 wav-
ing 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 grand-
children 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 mid-
dle 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, grace-
ful 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, seek-
ing, perhaps, to still my mind or find solace from the cold, perhaps, to find com-
munion 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
FIRE 141
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 every-
thing 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 red-
dish 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 stom-
ach 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 some-
how, 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.
The Postcolonial Cinema Of Lam Le:
Screens, the Sacred, and the Unhomely In Poussière D’Empire

Panivong Norindr
If any of the jargon of our times—postmodernity, postcoloniality, post-

feminism—has any meaning at all, it does not lie in the popular use of
the “post” to indicate sequentiality—after-feminism; or polarity—anti-
modernism. 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 tril-
ogy, 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 cul-
tural 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-
144 Panivong Norindr
ten and directed by Lam Le, has not received the same critical and popular atten-
tion 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 cur-

rent 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 post-
colonial condition” (9).
Lam Le’s film, Poussière d’Empire, is a compelling but difficult and challeng-
ing 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 colo-
nized. 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 peregrina-
tion of the message. The popular press has been quick to seize upon this “toe-
hold” 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:
THE POSTCOLONIAL CINEMA OF LAM LE 145
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 let-
ter 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 “interest-
ing”—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 rup-
tured, disorganized, wobbly, wavering narrative, does not resemble any-
thing 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 con-
tend, 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 dis-
appearance 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 dis-
tribution 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 aes-
thetic commitment that liberates him from the constraints of constructing a
filmic narrative modeled after Hollywood cinema. His aim was to “break 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:

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 sym-
bolic mode that willfully rejects realism, in order to present the factual sit-
uation 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’Em-
pire, 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 dif-
ferent type of filmic response, an interrogating gaze. In fact, he mixes and
includes other types of “realistic” but jarring sequences such as the extraordi-
nary long shot of the startlingly new white and blue Air France jumbo jet, taxi-
ing 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
temporal shortcut was undoubtedly inspired by his early studies in mathematics
and, particularly, of differential calculus:
I remember that when I studied for my Bachelor of Science in mathe-

matics, the only thing that I found fascinating and in which I earned hon-
ors, 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 screen-
play: “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 sensibil-
ity 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 sto-
ryboard: “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-
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 influ-

enced 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 pop-
ular 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 broad-
casting 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 per-
vades 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)
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 medi-
ation 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:

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 conceptu-
alization 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 inter-
views 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 cred-
its 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 con-
tinuity editing, this dust falls on earth as “leaflets” dropped from a French mili-
tary 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 wait-
ing, which has become a beloved subject in traditional Vietnamese literature.
This magnificent opening sequence, with a haunting score performed by a cho-
rus 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 mes-
sage”—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. Mur-
nau’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 cas-
tle 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 min-
imalist 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 Viet-
namese 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
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 histor-
ical significance. This would be true only if you oppose and privilege “fully-
developed 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 signifi-
cation.
One of the most fascinating and remarkable aspects of Lam Le’s work, how-
ever, 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 survey-
ing 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 finish-
ing touch on a small wooden box. Some of these scenes are filmed with a trans-
parent 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 spec-
tator deduce that the Vietnamese man is a “carpenter.” This sequence is liter-
ally 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 lit-
erally 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 sim-
ple 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 inter-
vening 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-
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 signi-
fying “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 inde-
pendent 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 Pathé-
Baby 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 absurd-
ity 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 dis-
junctive irony is self-evident here since the film she wanted to show to the vil-
lagers 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 spa-
tial and temporal coordinates. One such intertitle announces, for instance, the
“arrival of Joseph and Marie in Bethlehem.” As the presence of the village trans-
lator makes obvious, the villagers do not read or understand French. If linguis-
tic utterances are indeed a barrier to communication, the nun nevertheless
knows that the Vietnamese are predisposed to her evangelizing mission and con-
version. 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 initi-
ated” intones the nun. But, as Emmanuel Levinas has written, “without their sig-
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 con-
cerns 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 devo-
tion 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 vil-
lagers—medallions, crosses, effigies and images of Jesus and Marie, piously
arranged according to types and sizes—further trivializes her mission. But, ulti-
mately, 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 devo-
tion—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 dis-
appears. In this way, Western order and rationality invests and reorders Viet-
namese 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 dur-
ing 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 “con-
tent” has changed, but the “form” is still the same. Lam Le exploits cinemati-
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 appro-
priate these image to interrogate their sacrilegious presence.
Poussière d’Empire, then, is also a meditation on Lam Le’s own work as a Viet-
namese 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 déchire-
ments” (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 contempo-
raries 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 off-
screen, the painful traumatic events that suture the history of France and Viet-
nam. 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 aes-
thetic 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 “Viet-
namese 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
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 engage-
ment 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 imi-
tate 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 pro-
duction 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 intellec-
tually 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 mil-
lions 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 film-
makers 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 foot-
bridge” (Seguret 13) between the new Vietnamese cinema and French cin-
ema,17 between Communist Vietnam and the exiled Vietnamese diasporic
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 ref-
erences 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 urban-
ism. 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 [“scéno-
graphe”], actor, and co-author. At the same time, I gave up my studies at the Ecole des Beaux-
Arts, 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 for-
tune . . . ). 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).
14. Lam Le paints a fascinating portrait of Vietnamese cinema in the early 1980s: “Cinema consti-
tutes 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 Ren-

contre . . . 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 Viet-
namese culture without falling into an exoticizing gaze (to which Tran Anh Hung has suc-
cumbed), 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 cin-
ematic 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.
A Conversation With Linh Dinh:
Ho Chi Minh City, July 12, 2000

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 Viet-
namese. 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?
160 Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier
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 book-
shelf. . . . .
LD: Yes, I bought that last year and still have it. . . . .

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 experi-
ence 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 working-
class 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 Amer-
ican history, learn baseball, learn football, and you’re gradually allowed in. So
A CONVERSATION WITH LINH DINH 161
when you reach a dead-end, you’re in shock. You realize, finally, that you’re
never going to be allowed totally in.
LO: The cultural glass ceiling?
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 organ-
ically. 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 real-
ize 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 eventu-
ally 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 lan-
guage. 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 Viet-
namese citizen. As an American citizen, I have all these advantages. Just trav-
eling, 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: What were your conceptions of Vietnam before you came and lived here,
and how have they changed?
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 peo-

ple 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 any-
one. 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 liv-
ing 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 under-
handedness, you know.
LO: What do you think it’s caused by?
LD: Several things: maybe just human nature, maybe people are like that any-
way, they just happen to be physically close to each other, but not psychologi-
cally 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 hag-
gling. 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, cor-
rupts 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 Ameri-
cans who return play up to this conception: a guy could be flipping hamburg-
ers 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
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 fan-
tasy. 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 mid-

dlemen 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 sto-
ries 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 kiss-
ing 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 gov-
ernment 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
speak to that house but they don’t fight each other. There’s a lot of old his-
tory. . . .
LO: In your introduction in The Literary Review’s special issue on Vietnamese

literature,1 you wrote about government’s censorship, its monopoly on publish-
ing, 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 com-
plete 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 glee-
ful. 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 bel-
ligerent 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 Philadel-
phia, 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
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 feed-
ing me. . . .
LO: What is feeding you here?
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 newspa-
per, 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 think-
ing. 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 Viet-
namese 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 stereo-
types. 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 con-
structive 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 peo-
ple 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 the writer’s social and political responsibility?
LD: That’s up to him. That’s not his responsibility as a writer, it’s his responsi-
bility as a citizen. If that’s what he wants to do, that’s on top of his responsibil-
ity 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 under-
standing 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, how-
ever. 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 sol-
dier in the poem belonged to. I felt like sending him a snide note, “Tell me
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?
LD: Yes.
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 Amer-
ican 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 dis-
honest. 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 mat-
ter, 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 per-
ceived 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 Viet-
namese 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
that American readers will find them interesting. As a translator, I’m also an edi-
tor. 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?”
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 Viet-
namese 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 Viet-
namese 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 some-
thing 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 for-
eign. 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 Viet-
namese psychology.
Notes
1. “Vietnamese Poetry and Fiction,” guest-edited by Linh Dinh, The Literary Review 43.2 (Winter
2000).
Ho Chi Minh City, July 2000. Photographer: Jerry Gorman.
Tran Anh Hung’s Orphan Tales

Michèle Bacholle
With two short films and three feature films, Tran Anh Hung is now an estab-
lished 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 redemp-
tion, but Vietnam’s as well.
TRAN ANH HUNG’S ORPHAN TALES 171
The Scent of Green Papaya:

A Mythical Past and a Nation to Be Born
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 mater-
nal gestures. Shot in studio with few characters and fewer extras, it is character-
ized by slow movements, few words, and many sounds (birds singing, light
music), all of which contribute to its general sense of isolation, calm, and peace-
fulness. 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 abun-
dance 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 self-
confidence. 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 daugh-
ter, 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 tem-
porarily 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 cor-
ridor. One crucial day, as Mùi applies to her own lips red lipstick she found in
172 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 orig-
inal 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 attrib-
ute 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. Histori-
cally, 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 impreg-
nate [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 pro-
tagonist, how younger generations can diverge from an honest path and fall vic-
tim 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
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 dol-
lars. Here again, the central character is orphaned: Cyclo’s mother died in child-
birth; 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 symboli-
cally 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 chang-
ing, 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 mus-
cles 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
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 tra-
ditions 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 alco-
hol, 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 mid-
dle 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
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 hon-
esty 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 begin-
ning 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 dis-
sociated 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 fam-
ily 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 cor-
ner 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 par-
ticularity: Cyclo-cycle. As Tran once said: “I want to present, through the cycles
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 rhi-
zome 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 ini-
tiated 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 rhi-
zomorphic 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 pur-
sues 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 (suf-
fused 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 “becomes-
imperceptible” 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
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 coun-
try; 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 con-
trasted films, a closer examination reveals their complementarity: home/streets,
inside/outside, isolation/crowdedness, feminine/masculine, peacefulness/vio-
lence, 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 differ-
ent 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 peo-
ple’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 pres-
ent where progress is achieved, toward a brighter, more elevated future. Vietnam
has also traced that movement, progressing from centuries of occupation (Chi-
nese, then French, Japanese, and American) to a struggling but transitory pres-
ent, 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 Viet-
namese, the union of yellow and green, earth and water, symbolizes the father-
land, 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.
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 cam-
era 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 indi-
viduality 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 repre-
sented 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 reincarna-
tions. 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; fire-
crackers 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-
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).
14. “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.
15. 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).
16. In Cyclo, both episodes illustrate the constant threat to innocence.
17. In The Scent of Green Papaya, we never see the papaya being eaten; in Cyclo, ripe papayas are
devoured.
18. Both in The Scent of Green Papaya and Cyclo, red intrudes in the xanh-yellow pattern. In the for-
mer, 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 rep-
resent the blood that usually accompanies birth, in this case Mùi’s and Cyclo’s “(re)births.”
19. 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.
20. 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.
21. 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 Trémo-
let 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 pres-
ent in the film through the reference to the cat’s return.
22. 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.
23. 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
A Worthy Résumé

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 ques-
tions 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 open-
minded. 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.
182 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?
A WORTHY RÉSUMÉ 183
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 hos-
pital 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 won-
dered, a little upset by her suspicion. She hurried to the hospital, her belly show-
ing 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 disdain-
ful 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 cou-
ple’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 chil-
dren. 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 hos-
pital, 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:
184 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 second-
hand 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 Rus-
sia and Japan. It’s a disgrace to buy things that have been discarded by the Impe-
rialists. 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. Doc-
tors 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 hos-
pital 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
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 For-
eign Languages, and his heart filled with indescribable happiness.
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 for-
give 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 sub-
stitute 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. When-
ever 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.”
186 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 pres-
ident 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 qui-
etly all day. Rarely did he move around at work or at home. To boost her hus-
band’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-
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 pon-
der 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 Conversation with Y Ban

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 Cre-
ative 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 publica-
tion 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.
190 Qui-Phiet Tran
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 litera-
ture of permanent value.

QT: You mention humanism as a salient trait of contemporary Vietnamese lit-
erature. 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 pro-
noun 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 mar-
shaled. 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 human-
istic 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 condi-
tion 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 main-
stream? 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
A CONVERSATION WITH Y BAN 191
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 writ-
ers.” 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 produc-
tivity 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 liter-
ary 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 pub-
lish 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 Viet-
namese writers and their Western counterparts is necessary at this time?
192 Qui-Phiet Tran
YB: According to me, Western authors do better than their Vietnamese coun-
terparts in these genres: novels, detective stories, and science fiction. Neverthe-
less, 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. Never-
theless, 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 mem-

ories 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 fic-
tion. 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 vol-
ume 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 dur-
ing 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 depriva-
tion 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 sol-
dier’s family as well as Vietnamese youth’s lifestyle and practical concerns.
Across Colonial Borders:
Patriarchal Constraints and Vietnamese Women

in the Novels of Ly Thu Ho
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 soci-
ety 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 cul-
tural values. More specifically, Ly Thu Ho’s novels expose the condition of dif-
ferent generations of women in Vietnamese society over a period of six decades,
from the 1930s to the 1970s. Rather than attempt to disrupt patriarchal dis-
course, 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 charac-
ters. Her mother figures repeatedly stress the traditional patriarchal message:
women will achieve happiness and fulfillment by conforming to the roles soci-
ety 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
194 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 dead-
ened 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 bit-
ter 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 crit-
icism. 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 204-
205)
Ly’s approach differs from that of contemporary male Francophone writers such
as Pham Van Ky, whose denunciations of an oppressive familial and social sys-
tem are dramatic and violent. Destruction, death, or escape are the only solu-
tions. 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 col-
onization and decolonization, as well as her own exposure, as a Vietnamese
woman living in France, to contemporary cultural and literary movements. This
ACROSS COLONIAL BORDERS 195
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 Cross-
roads) 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. Char-
acters 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 after-
math 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’ mar-
riage. 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” (19-
20).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 grand-
mother 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”
196 Nathalie Nguyen
(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 Viet-
namese 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 tradi-
tion, 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 fol-
lowing: “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 com-
pared 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, some-
thing 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 Confu-
cius)8 expresses similar sentiments:
When a man dallies,
He will still be excused;
But when a woman dallies,
No pardon will she have. (Liu 21)
Eva Figes points out that “sexual taboos (or a code of morality) cannot be effec-
tive 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 daugh-
ters as well.
Thus, although Printemps’ mother figures, Mme Thai and Mme Hai, are
unhappily married, both unerringly convey to Tran the duties and responsibili-
ties 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 dif-
ferent from cultural prescription” (39). Both older women are able to recognize
the basic injustice of the sexual double standard, but they are incapable of voic-
ing 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
198 Nathalie Nguyen
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:
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 opera-
tion 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 hier-
archies. 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 per-
son, 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 mean-
ing. 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 unwor-
thy” (Printemps 167). When he returns 8 years later, after the signing of the
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 repre-
sents the third category of women: the prostitute. Nam consorts with Japanese
officers during the war. Here, she confides her motivations to her friend:
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 demi-
mondaine, 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 vio-
lence 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 med-
icine.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 encap-
sulates all the desired attributes of the feminine ideal: of good birth, gentle, lov-
ing, 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
200 Nathalie Nguyen
inculcates in women, all the better to criticize them by having them result in
Tran’s early and needless death.11
au Milieu du Carrefour
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 Univer-
sity 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 rela-
tives, an uncle who was Minister or a cousin who was the wife of a Gen-
eral. (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 inde-
pendent, 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 intel-
lectually 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-
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 cho-

sen 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 assess-
ments 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
202 Nathalie Nguyen
out that virtue and chastity, essentials of the feminine ideal, are middle-class lux-
uries:
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 well-
to-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 dif-
ficulties 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 con-
cepts 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 attrac-
tive: “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
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, pre-
mature 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 sur-

face 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. Cru-
cially, 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 man-
ages 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 addi-
tion 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
204 Nathalie Nguyen
day, letting out the bad odor that dishonors the entire family” (Mirage 119). Iter-
ating 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 pro-
vide 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 succes-
sion 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, Ngoc-
Suong is a student at the Couvent des Oiseaux (The Convent of Birds), a well-
known 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 Duy-
Cau. 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 engi-
neer 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 Car-
refour. 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
of women. It demonstrates, most importantly, that external appearance and rep-
utation are crucial to women of her social class. If getting pregnant was accept-
able 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 under-
lines 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 sol-
diers. 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 support-
ive and compliant” ( Jamieson 27). At the same time, it also represents the ideal
proposed by the heroines of classical Western fairy tales, which, Marcia Lieber-
man points out, “focus upon courtship, which is magnified into the most impor-
tant 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 199-
200). 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 prosti-
tute, is described by Kieu-Lien, a bar-girl, and the recognized mistress of Huu-
Lôc (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 visi-
bly 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 patri-
arch, dies at the beginning of 1975. He is thus spared the death of his son, Huu-
Lôc, 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
206 Nathalie Nguyen
left to eke out what living they can on the property. Thu-Thuy turns from a glow-
ing, fulfilled wife and mother into a haggard and prostrate widow, and Ngoc-
Suong 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 eter-
nal 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 Con-
fucian 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 nei-
ther voice nor presence unless she is attached to a man, and unless she is cater-
ing 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 mis-
tresses 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 soci-
ety: 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. Pre-
dictably, 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 attrib-
utes that characterized their predecessors. Their personalities stand in marked
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 pow-
erlessness in the face of great loss.
In her earlier novels, Ly invested her female characters with traditionally fem-
inine 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 tradi-
tional 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 van-
tage, 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 tech-
niques, 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 vul-
nerable, 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)
208 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 mil-
itary 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 con-
siderable 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 gen-
tleness 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 Car-
refour, and by the sadness, bereavement, and breakdown of Thu-Thuy and Ngoc-
Suong in Mirage.
In her most expressive novel, Printemps, Ly began her corpus by subtly reap-
praising 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 under-
gone 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 writ-
ings. . . . 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.
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 refer-
ring to Western society, but there are points of similarity between the mother-daughter rela-
tionship 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 occu-

pied. 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 ‘west-
ern’ 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 nine-
teenth-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 happi-
ness, 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 gen-
eralized the way an entire section of the Western media would like us to believe. It is only a tem-
porary 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 sub-
ject to sexual discrimination. A woman living in the West might respond that such discrimina-
tion 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.
The Sparrows Fly across the Woods

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 passion-
ate lovers. Now and then a gust of wind wafts into our small bedroom the pun-
gent 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 glit-
tering 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
212 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 parents-
in-law wouldn’t beat me because I wouldn’t have been their senior daughter-
in-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 spar-
rows. 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 tug-
ging 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. Swallow-
ing 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
THE SPARROWS FLY ACROSS THE WOODS 213
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 tat-

tered 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 rot-
ting 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 obvi-
ous 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.
214 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 cru-
elty that forced him to leave home by any means. People like Nam were fortu-
nate 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 bum-
ming. Than told me that his father used to hang Nam on a beam over the ceil-
ing 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 permit-
ted to visit his family for one day. He knocked loudly on the door in the mid-
dle 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 notifica-
tion. His remains must be still lying somewhere in Quang Tri. When ransack-
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.”
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 sen-
timents. Though Than is a copyeditor, he writes for some magazines occasion-
ally. 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 twenty-
five-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 summer-
time. Monsoon after monsoon swooped upon the old citadel, condensing every-
thing 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 spend-
ing 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:
216 Vo Thi Xuan Ha
“ . . . 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 sur-
rounding the old citadel?
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 every-
where 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 squat-
ting 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 but-
tons 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 girl-
friend . . . .” Than murmured absently.
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 allu-
via, 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.”
218 Vo Thi Xuan Ha
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.

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 spar-
rows flying past the woods, upward, higher and higher.
And she smiles.
Translated by Qui-Phiet Tran
A Conversation with Vo Thi Xuan Ha

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 Pic-
tures 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 recip-
ient of the 1999 Association of Writers Best Fiction Award.
Vo Thi Xuan Ha has directed the following films: Chiec hop gia bao (The Fam-
ily 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 For-
est), 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 cor-
ner 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, Viet-
namese 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
220 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. Viet-
namese 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 main-
stream? 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 gen-
eral 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 main-
stream and always hope to create a literature of our own or, if you wish, a liter-
ature for our times.
QT: How do you see the West? Do you think an encounter between Viet-
namese 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
A CONVERSATION WITH VO THI XUAN HA 221
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 Rev-
olution; 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 lib-
erated. 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 Bud-
dhism. 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 Amer-
ica. 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 pres-
ent 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 under-
stand that you’ve been criticized for writing this story.
222 Qui-Phiet Tran
VH: Diem, the narrator of the story, is my ideal female character. Whereas con-
temporary Vietnamese society prefers a Confucian woman, i.e., one who is
trained to exemplify her four virtues—industry, decorum, demureness, and gen-
tleness—I prefer Diem’s humanistic naughtiness. She stubbornly bears her condi-
tion 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.
Protest in front of Truong Van Tran’s video store, Westminster, California, March 1999. Photographer: Jerry Gorman.
Colonialism and Power in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover

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 indige-
nous 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 Bach-
Yên or Pham Van Ky’s Frères de sang (Blood Brothers), or to the wars for inde-
pendence 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-year-
old 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 autobi-
ographical 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 transforma-
tional writing, her representation of colonial politics remained largely unex-
plored 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 con-
text in Eden Cinema and The Lover.3 Still, the latter text remained largely unex-
amined from this important perspective until rather recently. Critics of Duras
and The Lover especially chose to focus their energies away from the larger polit-
COLONIALISM AND POWER IN MARGUERITE DURAS’S THE LOVER 225
ical questions at the heart of many Francophone texts.4 One of the first to pres-
ent 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 over-
lay 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 Architec-
ture, 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 con-
text. 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 explo-
rations 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 coun-
try 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
226 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 nov-
els, 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 cul-
ture, 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 sub-
missive 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 his-
tory—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 col-
onized, 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
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 insepara-
bility” (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 nation-
alism, when a premature uprising in 1930 inaugurated a period of yet unsur-
passed cruel and bloody repression.10 This effectively cleared the stage of
moderate nationalist leaders, paving the way for the official assertions of Viet-
namese 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 his-
tory, 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 Cam-
bodian king overlooking the Mekong River in Phnom Penh. Indigenous ser-
vants 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 exam-
ple 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 declin-
ing 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-
228 Jack A.Yeager
ting off the boat in Saigon or Hanoi” (62, my translation). In The Colonizer and
the Colonized, Albert Memmi develops this same idea:
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 ostensi-
ble 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 Cin-
ema, and The Lover, the fact remains that even The Lover’s narrator and her fam-
ily, 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—
animism, the cult of the ancestors, festivals, a language—helped the Vietnamese

resist being absorbed by the Chinese and also transformed the basic characteris-
tics of Chinese culture into Vietnamese adaptations (Williams 41-42). As a
result, during the time in which they lived on a Chinese protectorate, the Viet-
namese 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 fam-
ily, village, and mandarins to the emperor. Even though the Vietnamese inte-
grated 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 dis-
tinction on the racial level, for example, between the Chinese lover and Dô, the
novel’s only Vietnamese character. The suppression of Asian actors, even sec-
ondary ones, in a novel set in Viet Nam is especially problematic. It would seem
to counter Duras’s own pronouncements concerning her affinities and sympa-
thies 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, charac-
terized 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 Viet-
namese 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 mar-
riage would solidify the fortunes of both families, while providing for Chinese
230 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 rejec-
tion 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 invis-
ible 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 (genera-
tional privilege), routinely robs the mother and sister and later becomes a pimp
in Montparnasse (gender privilege), and tries to rape Dô (colonial privilege dou-
bled 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 indige-
nous women and to offer another model of oppressor and oppressed. This phe-
nomenon, 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 chil-
dren. “It is bitterly ironic,” he writes, “to find that civilization—symbolized in its
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 liv-
ing emblem the most ignoble treatment and afflicts her shamefully in her man-
ners, 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, how-
ever, Duras transforms its relations and in so doing seemingly blurs the colonial
categories in portraying a particularly complex interplay of desire. The partici-
pants here are not in clear-cut positions of power.19 The French girl may be vis-
ibly 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 Viet-
namese, and Asian, an outsider to the French colonizers. The French girl’s rela-
tionship 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 attractive-
ness. 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
232 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 get-
ting 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, refus-
ing 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 ambigu-
ity, they install a homoerotic dimension that transgresses patriarchy’s (colonial-
ism’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 ques-
tion of difference. When she first sees him, she notices the car, then the occu-
pant; “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 Euro-
pean 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 disenfran-
chised 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 indige-
nous 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
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 under-
scored by her sexual ambiguity as revealed in the man’s hat (“The crucial ambi-
guity 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 love-
making. 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 colo-
nialism 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 com-
mon” (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 phys-
ical 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 per-
fectly in the “he said/she said” structure of this closing paragraph. An ambiva-
lent 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 pres-
entation at that conference and to the members of the Seminar on Sexuality at Williams Col-
lege 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 Lion-
net, and Mary M. Rowan, as well as Leakthina Ollier and Jane Winston for their invaluable sug-
gestions. 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 Gers-
Villate 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
234 Jack A.Yeager
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, mar-
ginal and ‘feminized’ in different, actually complementary ways” (146). Sharon Willis in Mar-
guerite 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 set-
ting, place and time (5) and to Duras having been raised in Indochina, where she spoke Viet-
namese 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 masquer-
ades as ‘I,’ we cannot maintain a rigid and secure separation of same and other, interior and exte-
rior. 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).
4. The American reviews of L’Amant are characteristically silent on this issue. See, for example, Bet-
tina Knapp’s or Diane Johnson’s review.
5. At the Wichita State University Conference on Foreign Literatures in April 1987; this confer-
ence, organized annually until 1995 by Ginette Adamson, was devoted to the work of women
writers and often had panels on Marguerite Duras.
6. See Janine Ricouart, Ecriture féminine et violence: Une étude de Marguerite Duras, 40-55.
7. See also Jane Winston’s “Forever Feminine: Marguerite Duras and Her Critics,” “Marguerite
Duras: Marxism, Feminism, Writing.”
8. See Jack Yeager’s The Vietnamese Novel in French:A Literary Response to Colonialism and Vietnamese
Literature in French.
9. 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.”
10. 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 Viet-
nam; 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.
11. For more on Nguyen Tien Lang and this text, see The Vietnamese Novel in French, 105-109, and
168-171.
12. 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.
13. Memmi expands upon this separation and the wholesale refusal of the outsider by those colo-
nized: “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 dis-
tinction 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 Dis-
course on Colonialism, Césaire echoes Memmi, saying: “For my part, I make a systematic defense
of non-European civilization” (22).
14. 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 novel-
ists 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.
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.
15. Suzanne Chester concludes: “Despite Duras’s overt anticolonialism in The Sea Wall and her occa-
sional contestation of the discourse of colonialism in The Lover, in which the narrator both sat-

irizes 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 trans-
form 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).
16. 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.
17. 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).
18. See Suzanne Chester for a compelling analysis of the colonial patriarchal order.
19. 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 patri-
archal 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 alle-
gory, thereby generating readings that escape the moralistic tendencies of Manichean interpreta-
tion. 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).
20. 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. Replac-
ing “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 possi-
ble meanings (“lên”), denotes a rising up, referring perhaps to the prevailing of a market econ-
omy, 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).
21. 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).
22. Compare, for example, the endings of Truong Dinh Tri and Albert de Teneuille’s Bà--Dâm and
Pham Duy Khiem’s Nam et Sylvie.
23. Janine Ricouart also discusses the family as microcosm, torn apart by colonialism. See 146-147,
note 13.
Morning Light

Isabelle Thuy Pelaud
I haven’t slept again. In a few hours morning light will fill the room. The win-
dow 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, blind-
ing 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 sleep-
lessly 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 mat-
tress 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. Sud-
denly, I become the small green Lego passing between her swollen fingers, sil-
ver 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
238 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 under-

neath 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 night-
gown. 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 drip-
ping 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
MORNING LIGHT 239
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 audac-
ity 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.
Consuming Culture: Linda Lê’s Autofiction

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 Vam-
pire), 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. Crit-
ics 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
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:
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 fas-
cination, 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 reac-
tions 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 communica-
tion, 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 inter-
rupting sentences that are barely formulated, ideas that seek to materialize,
reminding us of what Pham Quynh said about the Vietnamese who speak
CONSUMING CULTURE: LINDA LÊ’S AUTOFICTION 243
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 pres-
ence marks a note of dissonance. In this shared community of writers and intel-
lectuals, 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 coun-

try” (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 cul-
ture 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”: “cul-
tivate the margins,” he says, “work the edges. Make sure you always have some-
thing 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 mar-
gins: she is living it, she is breathing it, she reeks of it. In writing this essay, dif-
ferent 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 mar-
gin. 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, represent-
ing the centered subject, and the shallow horizontal roots of Deleuze’s cele-
brated 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 cul-
ture 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,
“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 intim-
idation 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 leg-
endary 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 spo-
ken. 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 one-
self; of revealing a secret at the same time as living; the desire and the incapabil-
ity 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 sur-
vive 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 pla-
giarist 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 dou-
ble: “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.
“The plagiarist is the way in which civilization has accepted the anthro-
pophagous,” 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 duali-
ties. “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 inno-
cent, 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 dis-
cerning 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 origi-
nal 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 iden-
tity 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 surren-
dering 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 cor-
respond to the image of the other, an alienating image formulated by the colo-
nizer, 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 con-
sumption. 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 “canni-
bal,” that he opens up to the Occident, entertains the Occidental imaginary, and
leads to the appropriation of images that have always escaped the colonizer/pla-
giarist 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 cannibal-
ism 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
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 ques-
tions about cannibalism” (11), “thought that it was the British who were out to
eat them” (10). Though the Hawaiians did not practice cannibalism, they nev-
ertheless threatened the British with it. Thus, “cannibalistic discourse,” Obeye-
sekere 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 discom-
fiture 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 com-
parison to Europeans guns” (23). Another method of self-preservation is also
found in Creole literature, one that Mireille Rosello examines in her book Lit-
térature 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 indis-
pensable to him inasmuch as it represents a possible recuperation of this
unspeakable act, which gave access to such an intense pleasure that it “emascu-
lated” 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 pro-
vided 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 stim-
uli, 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 intel-
lectual 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 one-
self.” And to endure absence, one must “behave as a well-weaned subject”; feed-
ing oneself, “meanwhile, on other things besides the maternal breast” (14). In
incorporating the other’s culture, Vinh, indeed, behaves as a “well-weaned sub-
ject,” 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. Noth-
ing 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 con-
quered. 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 plen-
itude where language is superfluous. To return to the mother, in this case, is also
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 writ-
ing, 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 every-
where / 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 illu-
sion,” 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. Wher-
ever 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 anthro-
pophagy. 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 desta-
bilization during the encounter with the other, and to settle itself within the
blurred space of approximation. Paradoxically, the unspeakable act escapes dis-
course but gives birth to a subject who struggles in the in-between, in vague-
ness, and cannot be captured and imprisoned in Occidental discourse. It allows

him to “leave the country of madmen without entering the land of normal peo-
ple” (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 sub-
ject 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 inter-
view 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 infor-
mation.
EARTH CAFETERIA

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 253
Anise-flavored beef soup smells like sweat.

A large sweaty head bent over
a large bowl of sweat soup.
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.
Ho Chi Minh City, July 2000. Photographer: Jerry Gorman.
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C O N T R I B U T O R S

Michèle Bacholle is Assistant Professor at Eastern Connecticut State Univer-
sity. 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: Dou-
ble bind et transculturation was published by Rodopi in 2000.
Karl Ashoka Britto is Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Litera-

ture 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 publica-
tions 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 Uni-

versity, 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 Viet-
nam (Seven Stories Press 1996).
268 CONTRIBUTORS
Jerry Gorman is a photographer and a camera operator from Venice, Califor-
nia. He has spent the last five summers traveling in Southeast Asia with a cou-
ple 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.
Hjorleifur Jonsson is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology,

Arizona State University. He has done research in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thai-
land, 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 vol-
umes 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 Excel-
lence 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 Fran-
cisco, a member of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a regular com-
mentator 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 Nor-
male Supérieure. His interest in nineteenth-century poetry, exoticism, and inter-
cultural 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, Aus-

tralia, won a Commonwealth Scholarship to Oxford University, and obtained
her doctorate in 1994. She is currently Assistant Professor of French at the Uni-
versity of Newcastle, Australia. She has published on the subject of Vietnamese
Francophone literature and continues to carry out research in that field. In addi-
tion, she has begun to engage in research on Vietnamese women’s autobiogra-
phies in both English and French.
CONTRIBUTORS 269
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 pub-
lished in The Literary Review and Filling Station.
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 Litera-

ture 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 Col-

lege. She has written on women’s autobiography, Asian women writers of the dias-
pora, 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 Stud-

ies at the University of California at Berkeley. Her dissertation is on Vietnamese
American narratives. Pelaud is committed to teaching and to promoting Viet-
namese 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, 1880-
1924.” 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 Eng-
lish 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 Viet-
namese 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
270 CONTRIBUTORS
of Paper Bells. His poems have been translated into English and published in The
Literary Review and Filling Station.
Nora Taylor is Assistant Professor in the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program

at Arizona State University. She teaches Southeast Asian Art History and Viet-
namese 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 Univer-
sity. His publications include a book-length study of William Faulkner (Caroll-
ton 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 Amer-
ican 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 com-
missioning of this work was made possible by a grant from the National Endow-
ment 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-lan-
guage 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 collec-
tions 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 Uni-

versity. She has published articles on Marguerite Duras, Vietnam, and radical
politics. Her Postcolonial Duras is forthcoming (Palgrave 2001). She has com-
pleted 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.
CONTRIBUTORS 271
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 Med-
icine 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).

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 addi-
tion, he co-edited Postcolonial Subjects: Francophone Women Writers (University of
Minnesota Press, 1996).
I N D E X

acculturation: and anxieties, French colonial, 43; 57, 60; and the international art market, 10,
Asian women, catalysts of, 36; defined, 35; and 113–4; and tourism, 115; and Vietnam as
disindividuation, 41–2; v. encongayement, 41; exotic travel destination, 113; Vietnamese art
failure of, 38; and “motionless happiness,” 43; market, 113–4; and Western collectors, 10–1,
and transformation, 41; as transgressive, 36; 115–7. See also identity, Vietnamese
women, European, resistance to, 47 n1. See ARVN (Army of the Republic of Viet Nam),
also literature, French colonial; Lê, Linda 72, 76, 83
Accuracy in the Media, Television’s Vietnam: assimilation: Indochina, French colonial, 21–3,
The Real Story, 2 30 n5, 31 n14; of the other, 36; politics of,
Allende, Isabel, 198 249; and Viet Kieu, 70, 161. See also
American national identity. See identity, cannibalism; borrowing, cultural
American national Au Milieu du carrefour (Ly Thu Ho), 195, 200–3,
American War/Vietnam War, 53–7, 69; 220–1: 204; and earlier Francophone novels, 202
in contemporary Viet Nam, 163; historical autobiography, 192, 226; unhinged, 242
erasure of, 55; in global ethnoscape, 54–5;
mediascape of, 54; from the “other” side, Bà-–Dâm (Truong Dinh Tri and Teneuille), 202
76–7; terms, defined, 63 n1; Vietnam v. Bachelard, Gaston, La Poétique de l’espace, 147,
American War, 63; war syndrome, Vietnam, 149
181–7; in writing, Vietnamese diaspora, Bacholle, Michèle, 11–2
105–6. See also literature, of the American Bao Ninh, Sorrow of War, 79; “Wandering
War/Vietnam War Souls,” 77
American, becoming, 160–1: and disowning, Barthes, Roland, 244, 248
104; and disavowal, 9 Bataille, Georges, 7–8
Annaud, Jean-Jacques, The Lover, 4, 146, 150 Baudenne, Antonin, Sao tiampa, épouse laotienne,
anti-communism, 131 36, 40, 45, 46
anxieties, French colonial, 22, 25, 30, 43 Beauvoir, Simone de, The Second Sex, 12
Apocalypse Now (Coppola), 2 Bhabha, Homi, 5; The Location of Culture, 14,
Appadurai, Arjun: globalization, and the 143; on translation, cultural, 156; on fixity,
nation, 10, 55; on nations, reimagining of, 245, 250; liminal space in, 246; the
and difference, 124 “unhomely,” 144
art, Vietnamese, 111; and anticolonial ideologies, Billotey, Pierre, Sao Kéo ou le bonheur immobile,
113; diaspora, 114–25; before Doi Moi, 114–5; 36, 39, 41, 43, 45, 46
Doi Moi, 10–1,13, 116; ethnic labels on, 124; Blue Lotus,The, 148
and globalization, 10,124–5; identity markers, borders, cultural: dialogue in, 5; crossing, 6,
negotiating, 124; and national identity, 113–4, 228; and desire, 228; heterosexual,
123–4; Orientalist traditions in, 113; transgressing, 232–3; the in-between, 250;
production: in Vietnam, 112; Southeast Asia, and the métèque, 243–4; screen as, 153
274 INDEX
borrowing, culinary, 21–31; as subversive, privilege, European, 228; and religion, 153;
23–5; and alienation, 44; ambiguities of, 44; as a spatial praxis, 11; and the sacred, 11;
by Vietnamese elite classes, 21–5; by French, 53–93; projection of identities, 57.
Vietnamese lower and middle-classes, 23; See also identity, projected, under French,
effects on Vietnamese, 22; French reaction British, and Dutch colonialism
to, 23–9 con-gai (congaie). See also acculturation;
borrowing, cultural: v. acculturation, 43–4; literature, French colonial; The Lover (Duras)
from the other, 44; of Confucian-Taoist Confucian tragedy, 138
principles, 44; of Vietnamese lifestyle, 44; Confucianism: perfect wife, ideal of, 206; role

Vietnamese reaction to, 26–7 of women, 195; and poetry, 225–6; “Three
boundaries. See borders Obediences,” 206, 209 n6; marriage,
Bourdieu, Pierre, 3 229–30; and evangilization, 156–7
Braidotti, Rosi, 243 Confucius, 196
Braudel, Fernand, The Mediterranean and the Coppola, Frances Ford: Apocalypse Now, 2
Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II, Cu Chi tunnels, 153
58, 61 cultural encounters. See relations, cross-cultural
bricolage. See Le, Lam culture, Chinese, in Vietnam, 228; Vietnamese
Britto, Karl Ashoka, 9–10 adaptations, 228–9; as system of privilege,
Brogan, Kathleen, 77 229
Buddhism: in French colonial literature, culture, Vietnamese: “difference” of, 157
44–46; and decadence, 46; doctrine, 46; as Curbstone Press. See literature, of the
pretext for passivity, 44; and samsara, 45; and American War/Vietnam War; in translation
su-su, 45; in Tran Anh Hung, 178 Cyclo, 12, 136, 170–9; Vietnam in, 12;
Bui Xuan Phai, 123; and the loneliness of rhizomes in, 176
urban life, 116
Butler, Judith, 6 Daney, Serge, 155
Dead End (Nguyên Công Hoan), 26
Cambodia, as pioneering frontier, 39 Deleuze, Félix, 12, 243, 249
Cambodia, ethnic minorities, 53 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, 12; Kaf ka:
Cambodia, primitivist images of, 63 Toward a Minor Literature, 249; becoming-
Cambodian women. See women, Southeast animal, 176; becoming-imperceptible, 176;
Asian rhizomes, 12, 176–7, 243
cannibalism, 13, 241; cultural, 248; and Deleuze, Gílles, 12, 176, 249
plagiarism, 244–5 diaspora. See exile and diaspora
Cartesian logic, breaking, 145–7 Dien Bien Phu, 4,
Cartesian subject, 11 Dien Bien Phu, Schoendorffer, 146
Casseville, Henry, Sao, L’amoureuse tranquille, difference: postcolonial, as legacy of
36, 38 colonialism, 57; racial: and desire, 232
categories, colonial: 2, 7, 21; 233; subversion Dinh, Linh, 6, 7, 14
of, 37; imaginary, transgression of, 30; disavowal. See identity, American national;
culinary, subversion of, 22, 23, 27, 30 literature, Asian American; literature,
censorship, 120; of sadness in art, 117–125; in Vietnamese American
Vietnam, 164; of women’s writings, 194 Discourse on Colonialism (Césaire), 232
Certeau, Michel de, 6 discourse, racializing, 232
Césaire, Aimé, Discourse on Colonialism, 232 dislocation. See exile and diaspora
Chen, Ying, L’Ingratitude, 249 displacement. See exile and diaspora
Chester, Suzanne, 225 divisions, social, in French colonial Indochina:
“Chinh Phu Ngam,” 144 construction of, 21; subversion of, 22
Christopher, Renny, 9,105 Do Huu Phuong, 24–5, 30 n11
Chung, Ook, 241 Doi Moi, 76; 83 n12; Nguyen Van Linh on, 76;
cinema, “appropriate,” 155 124. See also art, Vietnamese
civilizing mission (mission civilisatrice), 231–233 Dông Khánh, 23
Clément, René, This Angry Age, 3 double, motif of: in Asian American literature,
Co Cong women’s press, 194 103; in Lê, Linda, 244; role of disowning in
colonial divisions. See categories, colonial formation of, 103; the self and its repudiated
colonialism, 11; as conflict over the sacred, 151; shadow, 103. See also Kingston, Maxine
French, and cinema, 153; colonizers, in eyes Hong
colonized, 228; of the imaginary, 151; Doumer, Paul, 25
INDEX 275
dualities, transcending all, 245 See also Grosselier, Georges, Retour à l’argile, 40–1, 42,
categories, colonial 45–6
DuBois, Thomas A., 99 Guattari, Félix, 12, 176, 249
Dubus, Andre, “Dressed Like Summer Leaves,” guilt: and self-hatred, 74–5; and subordination,
74 245
Duong Thu Huong, 76
Duras, Marguerite, 11, The Lover, 224–35; Un Hantover, Jeffrey, 116
Barrage Contre le Pacifique (The Seawall), 3, 15, haunting, trope of, 9, 77–82; in “ethnic”
224–5, 227–8; Eden Cinema, 224, 228; The American literature, 77; and ethnic identity,

Vice Consul, 225 77; and the recuperation of history, 77;
skeletons, as literary figure of war, 80; in
Elsewhere, exotic, 55, 146 literature, American War/Vietnam War,
Emerson, Gloria, 77 75–82
Emile (Rousseau), 196 Heinemann, Larry, “Paco’s Dream,” 78–9
encongayement. See acculturation Hergé, 148; see also Tintin
epistolary genre: and communication, lack of, Heston, Charlton, 2
100 Hickey, Gerald C., 52, 60
erasure, historical. See identity, American history, Vietnamese: representing, problems in,
national; literature, Asian American; 97–107
literature, Vietnamese American Ho Chi Minh, 3, 4; “Annamese Women and
Eshleman, Clayton, 167 French Domination,” 230–1
ethnicization, of social life, 57. See also Hölderlin (Friedrich), 5
identities Hollywood, projected images of U.S. See
ethnoscapes, global, in precolonial period, 60–1 images, projected
everyday life, French colonial Indochina, Holmlund, Christine, 225
21–31 hybridity, culinary, in French colonial
exile and diaspora, 6, 159–60, 243; and home, Indochina, 21, 25, 28; filmic,145; cultural: 7,
diaspora’s dream of return: 248–9; exile, 22, in Viet Kieu literature, 81 See also
internal, 123; “zigzagging,” 17–8; life in, 73; identities, hybrid
narratives of displacement, 98–9. See also
identity, mistranslated; identity, in-exile ideals: American feminine, and Vietnamese
Existentialism, 7 women, 98–100; Confucian woman, 222;
Vietnamese woman, 199–206; marriage,
Fanon, Franz, Black Skin,White Masks, 242–3 Vietnamese, 205
fear, French. See anxieties, French identity markers, negotiating, 124
feminine ideal. See ideals identity papers, 123
Figes, Eva, 197 identity politics, 8, 63, 64–5 n16
“forgetting,” historical. See identity, American identity, American national, 9; and disavowal,
national; erasure 71; and erasure historical, 71, 97–100; and
French, Marilyn, 207 national historical narrative 9; Vietnamese,
Friedman, Susan Stanford, 197 place in, 99
identity, ethnic, 52–63; as relational, 8, 59;
gaze: exoticizing, 157; racist and nationalist, 99, ethnic designations, 53; Jarai, 57; Lawa, 62;
100; cross-cultural, 103; postcolonial, 11, 153 Moi, 54, 60, 62; “Pemsien,” 57, 64 n15;
gender: ambiguity, 231–2; roles, Vietnamese v. Sedang, 57; Yao, 62
Western, 196; constraints, 204–5; double identity, Montagnard, 10; and anti-
standard, 196–7; heterosexuality, compulsory: communism, 54; and Dega, as global
232–3; roles, traditional Vietnam, 195, identities, 56; as a deterritorialized identity,
200–1, 206; roles, tragedies of, 207 8; as an identity-in-exile, 56; as a projected
Giai Pham ( journal), 117 identity, 8, 56; associated imagery, 53; and
globalization: and the nationalization of nostalgia, 55–6, 58, 62–3; connotations, 55;
difference, 53–4. See also art, Vietnamese debates over, 8, 52–5; European
Gorman, Jerry, 5 connotations, 58; historical erasures, 54–5,
Gosha, Christopher, 59 59, 62; and Indochina, phantasmatic
Greene, Graham: The Quiet American, 4 constructions of, 63; projection of, 56;
Greenwood, Davydd, 57 relation to Vietnam, 8; in the global
Greer, Germaine, 198 ethnoscape, 8. See also identity; annd the
grief. See identity; re-visioning through Internet
276 INDEX
identity, Vietnamese: anxieties and historical Other Side of Heaven: Postwar Fiction by
crises, 112; diasporic challenges to, 112–125; Vietnamese and American Writers, 71–82
in global world, 113; Vietnameseness,124; Karnow, Stanley, Vietnam: A Television History,
Vietnameseness, as defined in art, 114; 2–3
Vietnameseness, diasporic challenges to, Kham la Laotienne (Royer), 36, 39, 40, 41
114–7; Vietnameseness: negotiated identity, Kingston, Maxine Hong, The Woman Warrior,
124–5 104; and doubling, 104
identity: 22; abjected, 9, 105–6; and alterity, Kureishi, Hanif, The Buddha of Suburbia, 13
246; in Butler, 6; colonial, ambiguities of,

22; in de Certeau, 6; colonial, subversion of, L’Ingratitude (Chen), 249
10; construction of, 8; in contemporary language, as home, 161
Vietnam, 19; cultural, in crisis, narratives of, Lao women. See women, Southeast Asian
37; defined, 22; and displacement, 159; Laos, ethnic minorities, 53
deterritorialized, 55; and displacement, 159; Laos, primitivist images of, 63
drifting, 243; ethnicization of, 64 n16; fabric Laude, Patrick, 7–8, 10–1, 12–3
of, 6; fluid, urban, 21, 30; French colonial, Le Colonial (restaurant), 3
24; in French colonial Indochina, 6; global, Le Luu, “The Rucksack,” 77
10, 56; grounding of, 8; hybrid, 24; identity- Le Minh Khue, 9, 71–72, 76
in-exile, 56–7; imagined, 57; and the Le Mirage de la paix (Ly Thu Ho), 195, 203–7
Internet, 52–3, 56–8, 62, in Lefebfre, 6; Le Phat Thanh, 25, 27
misrecognition and disavowal, 10; mistaken, Le, Lam, 11; L’Atelier de l’Epée de Bois, 156;
50; (mis)translated, 6, 17; and mixed race cinema as “total art,” 156; on Confucianism
women, 237–9; mobile and modulating, 6; and evangilization, 156–7; Rencontre des
naming, 167; and practices of everyday life, nuages et du dragon, 155; Poussière d’Empire,
6; and place, 56; projected, 2, 8–9, 12; 11, 14, 143–56
projected, of Asian as enemy, 99; projected, Lê, Linda: on acculturation, tale of success,
under colonialism, British, Dutch, and 245; on “boat people,” 241–2; on “ethnic”
French, 57; projected, as means of control, experience, 245; on the exiled writer, figure
57; and projected images, 9, 11, 98; regional, of, 242; Les Evangiles du crime (“Vinh L.”),
28; routinization of, 54, 55, 60; 64 n8; and 13, 241–2, 244–50; as the other, 242–3;
state control, 62; and statemaking, 60; Slander, 241, 243; on Third World
subversive, 30; translocal frameworks of, 63; testimonial, 245
transnational, 56; urban, French colonial Lec, Stanislaw Jersy, 241
Indochina, 30; of Vietnamese art(ist), 10. See Lefebvre, Henri, 6
also Buddhism; globalization Lefebvre, Lucien, 151
images, projected: of U.S., in Vietnam, 98 Lefèvre, Kim, Métisse Blanche, 26, 28
imaginary, French colonial, 3 Les Chemins de la révolte (Nguyen Tien Lang),
Immigrant Acts (Lowe), 99 227–8
indigénisation. See acculturation Levinas, Emmanuel, 153, 155
Indochina (representation), 3, 56; and cultural Litérature et identité créole aux Antilles, (Rosello),
hybridity, 3; and historical erasure, 4; in 247
international culture market, 3; and literature, Asian American: characteristics of,
neocolonialism, 3; phantasmatic, 63; 98. See also double, motif of; literature, of
postcolonial era, 3; restaurant marketing, 3; American War/Vietnam War
and the Western imaginary, 4 literature, Francophone Vietnamese, 13, 224–6;
Indochine (restaurant), 3 novels, 224, 229; first monographs, 225;
Indochine (Wargnier), 146, 150 poetry in 225; novels, French male authors,
influence, cultural, on colonizer. See 231
acculturation literature, French colonial, 35–48:
acculturation, novel of, 7, 35–47 ; colonial
Jayawardena, Kumari, 206 novel, 7; con-gai novel, 13, 38, 230–1;
Jonsson, Hjorleifur, 8–9, 10, 12 colonial v. exotic novel, 7, 35; cultural
encounters in, 35–48; exotic novels, 35;
Kaf ka:Toward a Minor Literature (Deleuze and named for females, 36; of acculturation,
Guattari, 249) identity in, 8; Cambodian (see Grosselier,
Karlin, Wayne, 9 Georges)
Karlin, Wayne, 71–2; “Point Lookout,” 77–8; literature, of American War/Vietnam War,
and Le Minh Khue and Truong Vu, The 69–83; by Euro-American writers, 69, 74–5;
INDEX 277
and American masculinity, 74; “literature of Nguoi nguoi lop lop (Tran Dan), 117–8
return,” 72, 82 n10; by SRV writers, 69; Nguyen Mong Giac, 76
similarities, Euro-American and Viet Kieu, Nguyen Quang Thieu, “Two Village
72–73; in translation, 69; and Vietnamese Women,” 77
American literature, 69; by Vietnamese Nguyen Qui Duc, 83 n10
American writers, 69–70; by Viet Kieu Nguyen Tien Lang, Les Chemins de la révolte,
writers, 72–74; hybridity, in Viet Kieu 227–8, 231
narratives. See also haunting Nguyen Xuan Hoang (Viet Kieu writer),
literature, refugee v. immigrant. See literature, “The Autobiography of a Useless Person,”

Vietnamese American; literature, Asian 73
American Nguyên Công Hoan, Dead End, 26
literature, Vietnamese American; and American Nguyên Huu Dô, 24–5
national narrative, writing against, 97; Nguyen, Nathalie, 12
compared to Asian American literature, 9, Nietzsche (Frederich), 7
70; and disavowal, 9; as refugee, 70; nomadic subject, 243
transpacific influences, 71. See also literature, Norindr, Panivong, 2, 10–1, 116, 225. See also
of the American War/Vietnam War Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial
literature, Vietnamese: contemporary authors Ideology in Art, Film, and Literature
and titles, 189–90; Vietnamese national Nosferatu, Murneau, 150
poem, 226; verse romances, 226; novel, 226; nostalgia: French colonial, 3, 116; in Tran
autobiography, 226; and cultural borders, Trong Vu, 116–7; of Hanoi foreign
226; prose novel, women characters in, 226; community, 116; and social engineering. See
in Vietnamese culture, 189–90, 219–20; also Vietnam (representation); identity,
Vietnamese, essence of, 220; and Montagnard
Westernization, 220
Lowe, Lisa, 9, 70–1; Immigrant Acts, 99 O’Brien, Tim, 76
Ly Thu Ho, 12–3;193–209, 224; and Beauvoir, Obeyesekere, Gannath, 246–7
12; compared with Western women writers, Ollier, Leakthina Chau-Pech, 13
207; daughters in, 193–5; and French Ông Tây An-nam (Nam Xuong), 27
feminism, 208; influences, 194–5; Au Milieu Orientalism, postcolonial, 123
du carrefour, 195; Le Mirage de la paix, 195, Orlando Furioso, Ronconi, 156
203–7; novels, as subversive, 208; Printemps other, the; 248, colonial, encounter with: 242;
inachevé, 195–200; 200–3; Prix littéraire de desire for, 246; rewriting, 9; identification
l’Asie, 195; the prostitute in, 195, 199–200; with, undermining, 245; misapprehension
representations of mothers, 193–5, 200; the of, 242; obsession with, The Lover, 231;
servant in, 195; textual politics, 208 obsession with, Vietnamese Francophone
literature, 224; racial, 232; re-visioning,
Mandel, Georges, 2 though grief, 72; the Western imaginary, in,
Mascolo, Dionys, 5 242; in Western literary tradition, 45; passim
McGuinness, Stephen, 115 othering, 3
Mee, Wendy, 10, 56, 112 otherness: Asian, 99; in Asian American
Memmi, Albert, 2; The Colonizer and the literature, 104; in colonial literature, 35–47;
Colonized, 227–9 racial, 101. See also women, Southeast Asian
Métisse Blanche (Lefèvre), 26, 28
MIAs, 79–80, 83 n17 Palcy, Euzhan, Rue Case nègres, 144
Miller, Casey, 196 Peters, Erica J., 6–7, 10–1, 14–5
Mnouchkine, [Ariane], 89, 156 Pham Quynh, 242–3
Montagnard identity. See identity, Montagnard Pham Thi Xuan Ban (pseud. Y Ban): on
Montagnard, organization, 56 writing, 190–1; on literature in Vietnam,
Murneau, F. W., Nosferatu, 150 189–90; on Western writers, 192; on “A
My, Michel, 28–9 Worthy Résumé,” 192
Pham Van Ky, 194, 224
Nam Xuong, Ông Tây An-nam (Mr. French Pham, Andrew, 83 n10
Vietnamese), 27 Phan Huy Duong, 80–1
national identity, Vietnamese. See art, Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology
Vietnamese in Art, Film, and Literature (Norindr), 2, 225
neo-lacanians, 8 Philip Caputo, “A Soldier’s Burial,” 74
Ngo Tu Lap, “Waiting for a Friend,” 78–9 plagiarism. See cannibalism
278 INDEX
Plum Blossom Gallery, 114–5 Rue Case nègres (Palcy), 144
Poétique de l’espace (Bachelard), 147 RVN (Republic of Viet Nam), 70
Poussière d’Empire (Lam Le), 143–156; and the
Bible, 150; bricolage, 155–7; Cartesian logic, Said, Edward, 243
breaking of, 145–47; and colonial Salemink, Oscar, 57
archetypes, 147; compared with Tran Anh Sanda, Dominique, 145–9, 150
Hung, 157; cross-cultural resonances, 148; Sao Kéo ou le bonheur immobile (Billotey), 36,
and cultural identity, blurring of, 153; and 39, 41, 43, 45, 46
the gaze, postcolonial, 153; and German Sao tiampa, épouse laotienne (Baudenne and

expressionism, 150; and globalization, 11; Starbach), 36, 40, 45, 46
hybrid cinematic aesthetic, 11; hybridity of, Sao, L’amoureuse tranquille (Casseville), 36, 38
145; and the mimetic impulse, 155; and the Schoendorffer, Pierre, Dien Bien Phu, 146; La
other, absolute, quest of, 157; reception, 146, 317e Section, 157
155; stylization, Chinese-painterly, 150; and Segal, Erich, Love Story, 242
Tàpies, 146; and the sacred, 150; theater, self-immolation, 130
influence of, 148–149; and Titus Carmel, Silliman, Ron, 166
148; and the uncanny, 146; Vietnamese Socé, Ousmane, Mirages de Paris, 202
space, veiling of, 151–2; Vietnamese space, Socialist Realism, 120; in art, 115
desacralizing, 153; and Western pop cultural Sorrow of War (Bao Ninh), 79
forms, 148 Southeast Asia, representations of: as European
Pouvourville, Albert de, “Le geste révélateur,” self-representation, 46
37–8, “L’homme à la ceinture,” 43–4; Southeast Asian Women. See women,
colonial corpus, 47 n2 Southeast Asian
practices, cultural, in French colonial SRV (Socialist Republic of Viet Nam), 69, 71;
Indochina: 24–9; banquets, 23–5; weddings, filmic aesthetic, 154–5
25; Lao, popular, 40, 42 Starbach, Gaston, Sao tiampa, épouse laotienne, 36,
Pratt, Mary Louise, 2 40, 45, 46
Print Press, Vietnamese language in United stereotypes: avoiding, in art, 124; of outside, in
States, 82 n1 Vietnam, 162; and silence, 123; smiling
Printemps inachevé (Ly Thu Ho), 195–200, 204 Asian, 120, 123; of Taiwanese, in Vietnam,
propaganda, French colonial: images of 163
Indochina, 2; and the French colonial Stévenin, Jean-François, 145–7, 150
subject, 2 Stone of Waiting (pierre d’attente), 150
PRVN (People’s Army of Vietnam), 76, 83 Stone, Robert, “Helping,” 74; and Post
Puipia, Chatchai, “Siamese Smile,” 123 Traumatic Stress Syndrome, 74; “Helping,”
78
race, and racism, 161, 166; in The Lover, subject, the: dislocated, 245; French colonial, 2,
229–30; perceived abstractly, 104 8; Western, 13; relation to its other, 14
Rapp, Bernard, Caractères, 242, 244 Suleri, Sara, 13; The Rhetoric of English India,
Reading Asian American Literature (Wong),103 226–7
refugee, 77 Sulfur, see Eshleman, Clayton
relations, cross-cultural: in colonial literature, Swift, Kate, 196
35–48; and prelapsarian state, 43
relations, interracial, representations of, 200–2; Tale of Kieu,The, 195, 199–200, 208, 209 n11
in The Lover, 229 Taylor, Nora A., 10–1
Retour à l’argile (Grosselier), 40–1, 42, 45–6 Television’s Vietnam:The Real Story (Accuracy
rhizomes. See Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, in the Media), 2
Félix; Cyclo Thailand, ethnic minorities, 53–4
Ricouart, Janine, 225 The Buddha of Suburbia (Kureishi), 13
Ronconi, Orlando Furioso, 156 The Location of Culture (Bhabha), 5, 14, 143; on
Rootham, Mireille Mai, 225 translation, cultural, 156; on fixity, 245, 250;
Rosaldo, Renato, 5 liminal space in, 246; the “unhomely,” 144
Rosello, Mireille, Litérature et identité créole aux The Lover (Annaud), 4, 146, 150
Antilles, 247 The Lover (Duras), 224–35; ambiguity, gender,
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Emile, 196 in 231–3; ambiguity, political and social, in,
routinization. See identity: routinization of 232; Asians, treatment of, 229; and the con-
Royer, Louis-Royer, Kham la Laotienne, 36, 39, gai novel, 13, 230; and Francophone
40, 41 Vietnamese literature, 226; and Memmi’s
INDEX 279
colonial categories, 229; and privileged VC, Viet Cong, 54
space, 227; and Vietnamese nationalism, 227 Viet Kieu, 71, 159–68; assimilation of, 70, 161;
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in defined, 82 n6; art production, 112–25;
the Age of Phillip II, (Braudel), 58, 61 women, and abjection, 98; women, and
The Other Side of Heaven: Postwar Fiction by otherness, 98; writers, 69–74, 76–7, 80–1;
Vietnamese and American Writers (Karlin, Le writers, in France, 80. See also Phan Huy
Minh Khue, Truong Vu), 9, 71–82 Duong
The Quiet American (Greene), 4 Vietnam (representation): and American
The Scent of Green Papaya (Tran Anh Hung), national identity, 2–3; associated imagery,

11–2, 144, 150, 170–9; representation of 53; discourses of, 1–3; as an imaginary and
Vietnam, 11; and colonial identities, 11–2; cultural tableau, 1; as a lost object of desire,
and silencing of history, 12. See also 1; representations of, 1–3; and the colonial
Buddhism subject, 1; recoding of, 4
The Second Sex (Beauvoir), 12 Vietnam Studies Group (e-mail discussion
Third Cinema, 154 site), 8, 52, 57
This Angry Age (Clément), 3 Vietnam War. See American War/Vietnam
This Angry Age (Clément), 3 War
Thom Jones, “The Pugilist at Rest,” 74, 76 Vietnam, Central Highlands (Tay Nguyen),
Tintin, 11 52–63
tourism. See art, Vietnamese Vietnam: A Television History (Karnow), 2–3
Tran Anh Hung, 11–2, 170–9; The Scent of Vietnam: north/south relations, 163–4; social
Green Papaya, 11–2, 144, 150, 170–9; Cyclo, relation in, 162, U.S. embargo, 115. See also
12; exoticing gaze, 157; fatherlessness, censorship
cultural, problem of, 170; Vietnamese society: ambiguities, social and
Tran Dan, 10, 117–123; anticommunist political: in colonial Indochina, 232; gender
dissidence, 117–8; Nguoi nguoi lop lop, 117–8; roles and family relationships. See also Ly
“Nhat Dinh Thang,” 120. See also Tran Thu Ho
Trong Vu Vietnamese women. See women, Southeast
Tran Dieu Hang, 82 n1 Asian; women, Vietnamese
Tran Trong Vu, 10–1, 112–25; “La Chambre “Vinh L.” (Lê), 244–50
pluviale,” 118–9; debt to Tran Dan, 117–23;
“Document Intime” (“Intimate Wargnier, Régis, Indochine, 146, 150
Document”), 120–2; “Lampes aveugles,” water hyacinth, the. See identity; drifting
120; and Vietnamese identity, 112. See also Williams, Lea, 228
nostalgia; censorship; stereotypes, identity Willis, Sharon, Marguerite Duras:Writing on the
papers; art, Vietnamese Body, 233, 234 n3
Tran Vu, 82 n1; “The House Behind the Winston, Jane (Bradley), 225
Temple of Literature,” 73 Wolders, O. W., 60
Trân Tê Xuong, 26, 27 women, European, in French colonial
Tran, Qui-Phiet, 189–192 literature, 39
transgression, in colonial literature, 41; 168; 156 women, Southeast Asian, in French colonial
transnational identities. See identities; literature: 12; “Asian Eve,” 7, 36–39;
transnational assimilation of, 41; Cambodian and Lao (pou
Trinh T. Minh-ha, 6, 245 sao), as ‘uncivilized,” 39–41; Cambodian
Truong Dinh Tri and Teneuille, Albert de, Bà- and Lao, and “contemplative repose,” 40;
Dâm, 202 Cambodian and Lao, as embodiment of
Truong Hong Son (pseud.Truong Vu), 9, 71–2 otherness, 39; Cambodian and Lao,
Truong Van Tran, 4–5 perceived by Vietnamese women, 47 n4; as
Truong Vu. See Truong Hong Son catalyst of acculturation, 36; as emblem of
Truong, Monique Thuy-Dung, 9–11; “Kelly,” Asian culture, 7; objectification of, 40; as
9, 97–107 same and other, 58; as subversive, 40; and
the “uncivilizing pull,” 36; Vietnamese v.
University of Massachusetts Press. See Lao and Cambodian, 39; Vietnamese, 55;
literature, of the American War/Vietnam Vietnamese, as national symbol, 208;
War; in translation Vietnamese, in Tran Anh Hung, 12;
urban liberation, 7 Vietnamese, in Ly Thu Ho, 12. See also con-
urbanization, in French colonial Indochina, gai; Ly Thu Ho; The Scent of Green Papaya;
21–31 Cyclo
280 INDEX
women, Vietnamese: double consciousness, writing: and the (dis)alienation of
197; and national culture, 206; perception of identity, 246, 248; and fasting, 249; as a
European women, 197–8, 209 n15; and woman, 220; in U.S. v. Vietnam,
social and political alliances, 200, 209 n12; 164–5
and tradition, 196; writers, 194, 208 n1. See
also women, Southeast Asian Xuan Thieu, “Please Don’t Knock at
Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia, Reading Asian My Door,” 74–77; and haunting,
American Literature, 103 75
Writers’ Association Publishing House, 114

writers, Euro-American. See literature, of the Y Ban. See Pham Thi Xuan Ban
American War/Vietnam War Yeager, Jack A., 13

Of Vietnam - Identities in Dialogue (2001, Palgrave Macmillan)

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Of Vietnam - Identities in Dialogue (2001, Palgrave Macmillan)

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First published 2001 by

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ISBN 0-312-23872-X hardback

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Of Vietnam : identities in dialogue / edited by Jane Bradley Winston and

NX578.6.V5 035 2001

Design by Westchester Book Composition

First edition: December 2001

Printed in the United States of America.

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Introduction: Projected Identities/Subversive Practices, 1

After Zigzagging, Linh Dinh 17

Rap Music, Nguyen Quoc Chanh 19

Culinary Crossings and Disruptive Identities: Contesting Colonial 21

Moving along the Edge of Summer, Phan Huyen Thu 33

Cultural Encounters in French Colonial Literature, Patrick Laude 35

After Seven Days at a Hotel with T, Phan Nhien Hao 49

French Natural in the Vietnamese Highlands: 52

Orthotics for Easter, Nguyen Dang Thuong 67

A Cross-Cultural Context for Vietnamese and Vietnamese 69

Saigon Pull, Linh Dinh 85

Welcome to America, Monique T. D.Truong 92

Raindrops on Red Flags: Tran Trong Vu and the Roots

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City Streets 1, Hoang Hung 127

Fire, Andrew Lam 130

The Postcolonial Cinema of Lam Le: Screens, the Sacred, 143

A Conversation with Linh Dinh, Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier 159

Tran Anh Hung’s Orphan Tales, Michèle Bacholle 170

A Worthy Résumé, Y Ban 181

A Conversation with Y Ban, Qui-Phiet Tran 189

Across Colonial Borders: Patriarchal Constraints and Vietnamese 193

The Sparrows Fly across the Woods, Vo Thi Xuan Ha 211

A Conversation with Vo Thi Xuan Ha, Qui-Phiet Tran 219

Morning Light, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud 237

Consuming Culture: Linda Lê’s Autoﬁction, Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier 241

Earth Cafeteria, Linh Dinh 252

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In an interesting sleight of hand, then, Vietnamese-owned establishments are

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Critical Dialogues: Exploring Identity (in) Play

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Creative Dialogues: Identities in Play

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After zigzagging across an open ﬁeld,

After hiding under so many beds,

And who was it that taught me to rearrange my teeth?

In darkness, in privacy, I squat, tabulating