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3. GENDERED MEMORY

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6. Faces of Remembrance
and Forgetting

Hue-Tam Ho Tai

In Greek mythology, Mnemosyne is the goddess of both memory and imagination. In giving her this dual function, the ancient Greeks remind us that memory is about imagining the past. In Vietnam, memory has no name, but it has many faces, and, like that of Mnemosyne, they are faces of women.^[1]

The burden of remembering the dead and of imagining war and its place in the collective past has fallen to a postwar population in which women vastly outnumber men. Some are mothers and widows hugging to themselves memories of loss; others are young women deprived by war of the hope of having families of their own, as Da Ngan poignantly reminds us in “The House with No Men.”^[2] Still others, grown up in peacetime, have little patience with war stories. But memory is not just a matter of who does the remembering; it is also about the types of images that are available for doing so. Indeed, there seems to be little difference between men's and women's use of gender stereotypes.

Photographs of peasant women, their faces lined with age and grief, fill museum exhibits that honor both those who gave their lives to the cause of independence and revolution and the mothers who allowed them to make that supreme sacrifice. Along highways, huge billboards show pictures of smiling young women in flowing tunics (ao dai) and conical hats. The billboards beckon foreign investors and tourists with their images of a friendly, peaceful country in which local tradition combines harmoniously with the global economy. Popular magazines,

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meanwhile, peddle a vision of even younger womanhood enmeshed in a consumer culture that cannibalizes war memorabilia in the quest for throwaway chic.

This varied imagery attests to the importance of the figure of woman in the Vietnamese cultural landscape and to the multiple meanings it inscribes. Mothers, daughters, wives; peasant women and city girls; idle rich and toiling poor; resourceful and powerless; heroic and weak; self-sacrificing and selfish; traditional and cosmopolitan—these are some of the contradictory images of woman that populate the public discourse.

FEMALE CONSTANCY AND MALE ABSENCE

Only by disaggregating the concept of womanhood will we begin to understand how women can symbolize so many conflicting aspects of Vietnamese society and culture and, above all, how they can be made to represent both the power of memory and the fickleness of oblivion, both the debt that is owed to the revolutionary generation and the ingratitude of postwar youth.

If images of women can represent so many different things, it is precisely because woman as a singular conceptual category does not correspond to reality. Gender does not operate on its own but is inflected by age and kinship as well as class. This is especially true in Vietnam, whose language does not recognize the autonomy of the individual but instead enmeshes each and every speaking self in webs of familial and quasifamilial relationships. Images of women thus function in public discourse as a variety of social roles, each a concatenation of attributes and associations. Each image describes a discrete role totally unrelated to others even though, in real life, a woman performs multiple roles, some simultaneously, some successively. Among these, the most often publicly invoked ones are those of daughter, wife, and mother.A woman must negotiate her everyday self among these and many more roles, but in public discourse she is usually portrayed as a young victim of patriarchal oppression or as an admirably competent matron; as a devoted wife or a jealous shrew; as a self-sacrificing mother or a domineering mother-in-law. While one might argue that the necessity of discharging several roles simultaneously is at the origin of both negative and positive images of womanhood, in the symbolic language of public discourse, a woman is seldom described in more than one role at a time.

Some of the contradictions embedded in the different portrayals of

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women are the result of tensions between kinship and gender ideologies. In the Vietnamese kinship system, men form the core of the patrilineage but women are merely grafted onto it. Paternal relatives are thus called “inside kin” (noi), while maternal kin are considered “outside kin” (ngoai). In gender ideology, however, these roles are reversed. Women are associated with the inner sanctum, the core of the household; men represent its visible exterior, its public and ritual face. Whereas the women's sphere is the kitchen and their tasks focus on the material wellbeing of the family, the men's sphere is the front room, where guests are received and ancestors worshiped. In traditional Vietnam, the men's sphere extended to the communal house, where the public life of the community was conducted and from which women were excluded.

Vietnamese child-rearing practices, when combined with traditional segregation of the sexes, further contributed to the reversal of gendered notions of “inner” and “outer.” Children of both sexes were cared for in the women's quarters until the age of six or seven. At that point, boys ordinarily transferred to the company of men, while girls remained by their mother's side. It has been argued that, in the Confucian patriarchal family system, the continuity of the malecentered lineage entailed discontinuity and rupture for the women, who had to leave their natal families and were thrust into an alien and often frightening environment upon marriage.^[3] Men, however, experienced dislocation and loss at an even earlier age when they were taken from their mothers to begin the process of socialization into the world of males. Thus, despite the Confucian emphasis on the continuity of the male lineage, it is the image of the mother that represents the nostalgic days of childhood and the sense of connectedness with one's personal past. Idealized pictures of young mothers rocking infants in hammocks form a recurrent motif in the visual arts. Countless odes to motherhood have been penned by poets, while popular music, both traditional and modern, abounds in songs with titles such as “Mother's Love,” “Mother's Lullaby,” and “Mother's Song.”

In contrast to this picture of maternal tenderness and constancy, fathers are often portrayed as unreliable creatures, absent emotionally and often physically. This perception is linked to the cultural belief in the relative autonomy of men as beings who are free to “roam the lakes and the streams” (ho thi tang bong) while women are tied to their hearth. In 1924, while advocating the partial emancipation of women, Pham Quynh offered a metaphorical distinction between the essential natures of men and women:

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	Men are like clouds in autumn
	Women are like smoke in the hearth.
	Though they reach different heights
	They are both capable of soaring.[4]

It is the cloudlike nature of men, their lack of restraining bonds, that frees them and empowers them but also turns them into unreliable patriarchs. The fifteenth-century compilation of folktales Linh Nam Chich Quai (Wondrous Tales from South of the Passes) includes the story of “The Rock of the Woman Who Waits for Her Husband” (Hon Vong Phu). The story concerns a woman who is abandoned by her husband after he realizes that he has unwittingly married his own sister. As a child, he had been told that they would grow up to commit incest, and, wishing to avoid such a fate, he had tried to kill his sister. He had then fled, leaving her for dead. Upon finding that the prophecy had been fulfilled after all, he took flight again. The abandoned wife, ignorant of the exact relationship between herself and her husband or the reason for his abrupt departure, takes their child to the shore to look for him. Slowly, mother and child turn into a rock as they wait in vain. In the sixteenth-century folktale “The Woman of Nam Xuong” (“Thieu Phu Nam Xuong”), a soldier returns home after many years away at war.^[5] His little son, who had not yet been born when he left home, refuses to acknowledge him and informs him that his father only comes at dusk. The soldier immediately suspects his wife of infidelity. Distraught, she throws herself into a well. When dusk comes, the father takes his son to perform the daily ritual of ancestor worship. The little boy then points to the shadow his father casts on the ground and exclaims: “See, this is my father.” Only then does the man realize that, far from being unfaithful, his wife had tried to keep his memory alive during his long absence. Stories like this, often told to instill in young girls the importance of female chastity, underline instead the fearsome unreliability of male power. The twin images of constant mother and unreliable father continue to thrive in the contemporary Vietnamese imagination. In The Scent of Green Papayas (1991), by the expatriate filmmaker Tran Anh Hung, the father is portrayed as a feckless gambler who absconds with his wife's hardearned savings, plunging her, his mother, and his children into near destitution. His wife, by contrast, exemplifies boundless love, hard work, and uncomplaining selfsacrifice.

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MOTHERS AND SOLDIERS

Given the portrayal of the nation as family-writ-large in Vietnamese culture, it is not surprising that the discourse on the nation teems with images of mothers. Ho Chi Minh took the lead in honoring them: “Our people is grateful to the mothers, of both North and South, who have given birth to and raised all the generations of heroes of our country.” Raising heroes for the nation is not the only role a Vietnamese woman performs in either real life or symbolic discourse. Other dimensions of the female condition are also utilized to represent war as well as war losses.

Western war literature largely focuses on the experience of battle and, thus, on the experience of men. In works of scholarship, this focus has only begun to extend beyond the battlefield, making it possible to discuss women's experience. But the face of war, in both fictional and scholarly literature, remains overwhelmingly a masculine one. In Fallen Soldiers, George Mosse argues that the advent of the French Revolution linked citizenship to soldiering, while the democratization of the military through universal conscription gave rise to a countercurrent that, by focusing on the largely aristocratic officers'corps, made it possible to associate the military with manliness.^[6] Although it emerged in the nine-teenth and early twentieth centuries, this celebration of the officers'corps as embodiment of manly virtues is rooted in the medieval chivalric ideal and goes back even further to the Greek and Roman traditions. In what Mosse calls the “Myth of War Experience,” combat became the ultimate test of manhood, the experience that separated the men from the boys, as well as the passport to full citizenship. Ironically, this myth was shattered by the Vietnam War. As a result, “the Vietnam War Memorial can stand not only as a monument to the fallen of that war, but also, snatching victory from defeat, as a monument to the death, however provisional, of the Myth of War Experience.”^[7]

By contrast, only a few works in the Vietnamese language celebrate combat or the feeling of brotherhood forged in battle. Instead of epic poems, praise songs, and ballads, most of the writings penned by the country's heroes are elegiac meditations steeped in the Buddhist belief in the transitory nature of fame and glory, and in the centrality of suffering to the human experience. One of Vietnam's greatest poems, The Lament of the Soldier's Wife (Chinh Phu Ngam Khuc), was written in the mid–eighteenth century by a male author, Dang Tran Con, not to

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celebrate combat but to express the pain of waiting for the absent soldier.^[8] To be sure, the wars of the late eighteenth century, which raged over three decades, also brought forth a number of larger-than-life figures. By and large, however, most historical and fictional accounts of these wars portray the soldiers as undisciplined louts rather than knights in shining armor or gallant officers. In the nineteenth century, the emperors sought to restore order to society by promoting Confucian ideology and elevating civilian officials over military ones. Although officers were valued, military life in general was associated with the lowly. The poorest peasants found their way into the army precisely because they were the most powerless males in society, in no position to object to being drafted.

This tendency to devalue the military was slowly reversed in the late 1920s when anticolonial activists began seeking recruits from among colonial troops, and later, when both sides of the Vietnam War portrayed military service as an honorable and patriotic duty. As Shaun Malarney writes, the North Vietnamese state devised a whole set of commemorative practices to honor the war dead and generate popular support for its cause. This cause was described as a war of national salvation first against the French and later against the Americans. The valorization of the military, however, did not produce a cult of masculinity because it was in keeping with the traditional depiction of war as something forced on the Vietnamese people rather than initiated by them.

This historiographical tradition conveniently ignores the many episodes in which the Vietnamese have acquired territory by annihilating, displacing, or assimilating whole populations such as the people of Champa in what is now central Vietnam in the fifteenth century, and the Khmers of the Mekong Delta since the eighteenth century. It also obfuscates the numerous times when Vietnamese fought against Vietnamese rather than foreigners, during power struggles and episodes of peasant unrest. It highlights instead the experience of fighting in the defense of the homeland.^[9] This writing of history as a narrative of patriotic endeavor presents war not as an opportunity for men to test their mettle but as an evil necessity that must be endured by all. It allows heroism to be celebrated without associating it almost exclusively with battlefield combat, as is the case with much Western ideology. Heroism and courage are glossed instead as determination, endurance, the spirit of self-sacrifice, and, above all, the willingness to fight against an invader

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whatever the odds. It need not be an especially aristocratic or masculine quality.

Indeed, the representation of war as an exercise in patriotic selfdefense makes possible its feminization. It makes use of images of the country as victim of oppression and as family whose home is being invaded. These two images are linked to two different conceptions of womanhood. The first, the country as victim, is most closely associated with the figure of the vulnerable young girl at the mercy of cruel fate.^[10] Significantly, however, rape and defilement, which is perhaps the most potent metaphor available to describe the invasion of national space by foreigners, is not often used in Vietnam as it has been in the West from the Rape of the Sabine Women to the present. Women who have lost their chastity, whether willingly or not, are utterly stigmatized in traditional Vietnamese culture and thus cannot serve as national symbols.^[11] Few anticolonial tracts associate rape with colonial conquest, though appeals to women to join in the liberation of the nation and win their own emancipation in the process were a staple of patriotic rhetoric in the 1920s and 1930s. The most notable exception is Ho Chi Minh's Le Procès de la colonisation franc¸aise, which was written in 1925 with a French rather than a Vietnamese audience in mind and freely describes rape and pillage as colonial crimes.^[12]

If the victimization of the country is rendered through the figure of a young and weak girl, patriotic historiography that celebrates the struggle for independence begins with an uprising led by two women. Conventional history normally elides the lives of women, but the Trung Sisters, who led an uprising against Chinese rule in a.d. 39, are the most famous and perhaps the most beloved figures in the Vietnamese pantheon of heroic figures. They have been the subject of countless local cults since their death in a.d. 43, and of a state cult since the twelfth century. Their importance in Vietnamese culture lies not only in the fact that they were the first recorded heroes in centuries of struggle against Chinese domination but also in their gender. They lived in an era when Vietnamese society was characterized by bilateral kinship and uxorilocal marriages; they were descended in the maternal line from the legendary Hung kings and were daughters of a powerful lord. Over the centuries, however, both oral tradition and Confucian historiography turned them into paragons of feminine meekness and modesty. They have been cast as essentially timid women who set aside feminine decorum to avenge the wrongful death of the elder sister's husband and, in the process,

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overthrow Chinese tyranny. The greater the reserve attributed to them, the more admirable their resolve in overcoming it. The popular depiction of the Trung Sisters stands in marked contrast with that of Lady Trieu, a nineteen-year-old girl who rose up in a.d. 248, also against Chinese rule, but without the similar motive of seeking revenge. Unlike the decorous Trung Sisters of popular culture, whose female soldiers are said to have fled at the sight of naked Chinese males, she “went into battle astride an elephant … throwing her yardlong breasts over her shoulders.”^[13] Lady Trieu is quoted in the history books as having replied to an inquiry about her marriage plans: “I wish to ride a strong wind and tame fierce waves, kill sharks in the Eastern sea, force back the Chinese armies and throw off the chains of slavery; how could I possibly accept to be some man's servant?”^[14] It is perhaps her passionate defense of personal (as opposed to national) independence and her lack of an appropriately Confucian motive for throwing herself into battle that makes her unfit for the task of representing a besieged nation.

Stories such as those of the Trung Sisters and Lady Trieu have been used to explain the popular saying “When war comes, even women must fight” (giac den nha, dan ba cung danh), which suggests that women are recruits of last resort into the fight to defend the homeland. Unless war comes so close to them that they have no other alternative, women have no business fighting. As Nguyen Don Phuc reminded advocates of women's emancipation in 1925, “The virtue of the Oriental woman does not lie in quelling revolt in the East or bringing order to the North [danh dong dep bac]; nor does it reside in competing with men for sexual equality or in studying the stars or algebra. Even if they are educated, they should learn only the Four Virtues [tu duc]”^[15] It is, however, precisely adherence to the Four Virtues that enables women to contribute to the struggle against invaders. Among these virtues, resourcefulness and good management rank first. Women, after all, are charged with managing their households and protecting the wellbeing of their families, duties that call for skills worthy of a battlehardened general. The association between generalship and domestic management is humorously captured in the popular description of the housewife as “general of the interior” (noi tuong).

In Western thought, battle masculinizes the landscape as men organize to defend their homes, their fields, and their women, while the latter retreat to the comparative safety of their homes. As the French national anthem exhorts men, “Citizens, take up arms and form battalions, fight those who would slit the throat of your wives and daughters, and let

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their impure blood nourish your fields.” Lynn Hunt and others have pointed out that the French republican ideal of universal male franchise was linked to a deliberate attempt to rid the public sphere of the corrupting influence of women after the reign of Louis XV, whose various mistresses had often interfered in matters of state.^[16] While the French Revolution created France's first national standing army and a republic based on universal suffrage, both were open to men only. French women did not gain the right to vote until after World War II, in 1948.

Working in a different vein, Drew Faust pointed out that the mobilization of Southern men in the Civil War feminized public space in the American South as women assumed tasks hitherto reserved for men.^[17] Nina Silber suggests another rationale for the feminization of the Southern landscape, this time focusing on the postbellum period.^[18] She argues that the defeat of the agrarian South enabled the more industrial, and above all victorious, North to turn it into an object of romance. In her reading, the feminization of the Southern landscape was largely a postwar phenomenon, a product of its defeat.

In Vietnam, however, war feminizes the Vietnamese symbolic landscape. The transformation happens not because women must move into public spaces left vacant by enlisted men but because the division between private and public becomes blurred. The feminization of the landscape is a sine qua non of the strategy of total mobilization that is necessary to rescue the nation from invasion. It works best when the population can be persuaded that it is under attack, that its home is imperiled. This strategy is based on the tradition of guerrilla warfare, which involves luring the enemy deep onto Vietnamese soil, where it would be surrounded by hostile peasants intent on defending their homes and villages. Guerrilla warfare is not only a strategy appropriate to the technologically inferior; it also has the advantage of not relying on the deployment of standing armies with welltrained officers. Instead, it blurs the distinction between the front line and the rear, between combatants and civilians, between the masculine battlefield and the feminine domestic space. When protecting one's home becomes synonymous with defending the homeland, women, too, can be mobilized, for if they can be portrayed as hapless victims, they are also expected to be resourceful, to behave as “generals of the interior.”

The South Vietnamese government ignored this tradition and consistently portrayed the Vietnam War as a civil war arising from ideological conflict; it also employed a high-technology strategy that depended on trained soldiers. Although it tried to generate support among the civilian

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population, that support was expected to be largely passive. As a result, women were not mobilized either into the army or into greater warrelated production. By contrast, the North Vietnamese state successfully mobilized large numbers of women to fight in the War Against the Americans. Its leaders did not argue that guns were unfeminine instruments, or that defending the country was a man's job. Nor did they argue, as some American critics of the deployment of women in the military continue to do, that the presence of women would be deleterious to masculine military morale or that certain tasks were beyond women's capabilities. Women, instead, worked in the fields—as they have always done—with machine guns slung over their shoulders. They risked their lives to bring heavy ammunition to passing military brigades; some even volunteered to fight in the jungles of the Central Highlands. This is not to suggest that women did not encounter male prejudice in the course of fulfilling these many tasks, or that they did not have problems reconciling their images of themselves as women with the tasks they performed. Vietnamese cultural expectations regarding women's proper place and responsibilities were so varied and mutually contradictory as to allow women to assume military duties while holding them to unchanged standards of feminine decorum. Fighting women thus lived under enormous strains.^[19]

The importance of women's contribution to the war effort and of noncombat activities such as production work was publicly recognized by the North Vietnamese state during the War Against the Americans with the award of medals to women who had displayed the “Three Competencies” (Ba Dam Dang): competence in replacing men in production work; competence in mobilizing relatives into the army; and competence in fighting if necessary. Women who distinguished themselves in either of these endeavors received a medal that read: “Loyal, courageous and resourceful.” Of the three virtues thus recognized, only the second is not traditionally associated with femininity.

In a war of total mobilization in the defense of one's home, war service is not an entitlement to higher social status. With the return of peace, social order is restored as well, and all those who fought are expected to resume their prewar lives. The equation of home and homeland is attenuated, and women's managerial skills are once again confined to their domestic spheres. Women's very real contributions to the war effort in the North did not alter gender relations or their symbolic role in the public discourse.

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KEEPERS OF MEMORY

If the invaded country can be associated with the figure of a helpless young girl, and if the country at war can summon up visions of the Trung Sisters and transform women's domestic skills into military ones, postwar remembrance has brought forth another image of women.

Memory is an important aspect of cultural production, a production that the state is eager to control. In the two decades since the war ended, the Vietnamese state has tried to shape collective memory to underline the continuity between the Revolution and the War Against the Americans, on the one hand, and past struggles for national independence, on the other. The year 1995, which marked the twentieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon (April 30) and the fiftieth anniversary of independence (September 2) and the founding of the Vietnamese People's Army (December 19), saw an outpouring of commemorative products, speeches, and rituals. It is customary in Vietnam to honor a man by paying one's respect to his mother. In the same spirit, it is the mother, rather than the wife, who is the cultural vector of grief and memory (fig.6.1). At the center of commemoration, therefore, was the face of the mother of heroes, full of pride in their deeds and sorrow for their loss.

War commemoration in Vietnam thus is quite different than in the West. In Western literature, war is often treated as a rite of passage that makes men out of callow boys. If a soldier succumbs, his memory is located with his wife or sweetheart. In the words of James Jones, war is a “widowmaker.” In Vietnamese commemorations of war, however, the dominant voice belongs to mothers rather than wives. Most soldiers were too young to be married when they went into the army, and thus were deprived of the culturally significant rites of passage that would have granted them entry into the community of adult men: marriage and fatherhood. But marriage in Vietnam does not require that a man “cleave only to his wife”; for him, the key emotional relationship remains with his mother. Even hardboiled veterans have been known to wax lyrical on the subject of motherhood: “In the life of each of us, our mother is our support, our faith, our sheltering shade, the stuff of life; always nurturing and raising us to become adults; mothers are ready to bear any burden, to sacrifice everything, never asking anything for themselves, except for the ultimate wish that their children should always be faithful to the Homeland and pious toward the people.”^[20]

The cult of motherhood may account for the abundance of statues,

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posters, and paintings variously entitled Mother or Mother's Love in commemorative exhibits. Representations of women-as-mothers vastly outnumber depictions of women's warrelated activities. Female soldiers are most often portrayed in off-duty moments: with a rifle over a shoulder but also a child nursing at the breast, a reminder that women took up weapons to defend their young. The equation of women as mothers and of men as their sons is a powerful one. In 1995, the Museum of Women of Ho Chi Minh City staged a special exhibit to celebrate Cu Chi, an area famous for its tradition of rebelliousness long before it became the site of a vast network of underground tunnels that served as headquarters of the guerrillas operating in the Saigon region during the Vietnam War. The exhibit was arranged around two sets of pictures.

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One was called “Heroic Mothers,” the other “Courageous Sons.” At least one of the socalled sons looked to be in his sixties.A poster included in an exhibit mounted at the Museum of Fine Arts in Ho Chi Minh City to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the Vietnamese People's Army captures the strength of the bond between mother and son. In the foreground is a detachment of resolute young men; above them floats an elderly woman. The caption reads: “We look to Mother; every task we are given, we complete it in order to please Mother.” One sculpture on permanent display in various museums throughout the country depicts a soldier eager to be off, while his mother, crouching in front of him, mends a tear in his trouser leg. While this sculpture illustrates the patriotic eagerness of the son and the stoic acceptance of the mother, another motherson pair captures the joy of reunion in a photograph, also included in numerous museum exhibits, of a released prisoner of war clasping his aged mother in his arms. The Museum of American War Crimes (now renamed War Remnants Museum) in Ho Chi Minh City features a sculpture made entirely of rusted metal recovered from weapons and simply entitled Mother. A bronze statue of a woman holding her dead soldier son in her arms stands in the middle of the courtyard of the former American consulate in Da Nang; it is both a symbol of the reoccupation of national space and a tribute to the fallen.

By fixing on the figure of the grieving mother, Vietnamese culture infantilizes the dead soldier. Unlike the Western soldier who has tested his manhood in combat, he remains eternally a child, as a popular song of the South suggests:

	She rocks her child, cradling the bullet that turns his wound red.
	At twenty, her child went away to soldier.
	And having gone, never came back.
	Sleep my child, child of a yellow-skinned mother.
	My god, this body once so slight.
	Which I, your mother, once carried in my womb,
	Which I, your mother, once cradled in my arms,
	Why do you sleep at twenty?[21]

The statues, photographs, and paintings of mothers of soldiers were designed partly in homage to the soldiers, both dead and living, partly as a means of acknowledging the enormous sacrifices of the civilian population. These commemorative productions were functionally equivalent to the military cemeteries in which the soldiers who died during the Revolution and the War Against the Americans are buried. Another

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way of honoring their survivors was to create the status of “Heroic Mother” (Me Anh Hung). This trend had been around for some time, but it reached unprecedented heights in late 1994 with the passage of a resolution in the National Assembly that set criteria for the award of medals to Heroic Mothers. The basic criterion for receiving such a medal was that the woman so honored must have lost at least three children. Although women who had fewer children but had lost them all were also honored, many who received a medal had lost more than three. The resolution received huge press coverage and was enormously popular throughout the country. Most communities organized ceremonies to honor local recipients of the medals, and exhibits were mounted in many places around the theme of Heroic Mothers (fig 6.2).

As the anniversaries succeeded one another in 1995, it became clear that there was growing ambivalence about the past decades of war and revolution. Commemorative events were not only opportunities for the state to inject new vigor into its narrative of national glory and heroic struggle; they also occasioned contrapuntal, subversive questioning of this legacy of struggle. The adoption of the Doi Moi program of economic reforms and engagement in the global economy seemed to undermine the very rationale for war and revolution. In the wake of profound economic difficulties and the worldwide decline of Marxism-Leninism, the triumphalist mood of the immediate postwar period had dissipated and the meaning of victory had become clouded.

Commemoration that was structured not around the celebration of triumph but around the acknowledgment of loss seemed appropriate, and honoring the mothers of dead soldiers was particularly fitted to this purpose. But this was not entirely without risk. Focusing on the extraordinary losses suffered by the Heroic Mothers could—and occasionally did—lead to a questioning of the human cost of war. The combined toll for North and South Vietnam is well over three million, which does not take into account the three hundred thousand North Vietnamese soldiers officially listed as missing in action. In 1991, the playwright Ngo Thao, who had taken part in a major landmark of the 1972 Easter Offensive, the battle of Quang Tri, called that battle “a senseless tragedy.”^[22] Around that time, two veterans, one male and one female, published novels that captured this feeling of senseless tragedy: Bao Ninh with The Sorrow of War and Duong Thu Huong with Novel without a Name.^[23]

Acknowledgment that the Vietnam War was a civil war came late in

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the North. By 1995, however, the theme of brothers meeting on the battlefield after a long separation and realizing that they were committed to fight on opposite sides had become a popular trope in literature and television programs.^[24] In the South, however, the Vietnam War had been portrayed as a civil war all along, and there, instead of representing women's willingness to make personal sacrifices for a just cause, maternal images symbolized national grief. The image of Mother Vietnam weeping for all her children was popular in southern poems and songs written during the war. As the songwriter Trinh Cong Son put it in his “Mother's Legacy” (Gia Tai Cua Me) in 1969, “One thousand years of being enslaved by the Chinese; one hundred years of being colonized by the French; twenty years of civil war, day in day out. This is mother's legacy: a forest of dry bones, mountains covered with burial mounds.”^[25]

Heroic Mothers include only those whose sons and daughters died in the cause of the Revolution and the War Against the Americans. There are countless other mothers whose sons died fighting in the South Vietnamese army, and whose grief goes officially unacknowledged. Photographs of wrinkled women who are said to have lost three, five, or nine children blend into the collective figure of Mother Vietnam who loves

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her children unconditionally and mourns them equally, whatever side they fought on. They remind many southern viewers of the war losses they suffered but that have been erased from public memory.^[26]

MANAGING PEACE

This commemorative silence is striking in light of what some scholars have called the “southernization” of Vietnam under Doi Moi, that is, its conversion into a replica of the pre-1975 South. In both the nostalgic recollections of disaffected southerners and the wishful projections of envious northerners, this pre-1975 South is not marked by war, chaos, or corruption, but represents an era of abundant consumer goods and relative freedom. Yet those who died so that the South could remain what the country as a whole is now becoming continue to be publicly unmourned.

The transformation of Vietnam along “southern” lines makes difficult comparisons between postwar Vietnam and postbellum America. Still, there are some similarities between the Vietnamese South and the American South. Both, unlike their northern counterparts, were heavily agrarian; both were defeated in a civil war; and both have been feminized in the cultural memory of their respective societies. The association of femininity with the Vietnamese South actually predates Communist victory. The lack of strong allegiance to Confucian ideology among southerners, their greater interest in making money rather than in acquiring diplomas or joining the bureaucracy—all these fed into a set of gender stereotypes in which women were associated with economic activities and lack of access to formal education and public life. Even the popularity of Buddhism in the South could be taken as a sign of femininity, since women were its greatest source of support. The North, however, with its stronger Confucian legacy and its role as a source of bureaucratic and political manpower, was cast as more masculine. Other regional differences were also described in gendered terms: southerners, living in the fertile Mekong Delta, were indolent and hedonistic in comparison with the rest of their compatriots.

The very qualities that seemed to explain southern defeat at war, however, may explain southern success in peacetime. With Doi Moi, postwar reconstruction has been cast in economic terms. The two heavily masculine sectors, the bureaucracy and the army, are retrenching while the private trading sector, a traditional feminine domain, is expanding. The social transformation of Vietnam since Doi Moi has generated

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much ambivalence, not to mention regional tensions. This ambivalence focuses on two sets of issues, both of which have found expression in gender symbolism: the first involves the shifting status of those involved in economic activities and those engaged in intellectual and political pursuits; the second concerns memory and forgetting. The shift from political status to economic power is dramatized through the image of the “general of the interior,” while youthful fickleness seems embodied by the nubile fashion plates who decorate magazine covers and billboards (fig.6.3).

The year after Doi Moi was launched, the film How to Behave (Cau Chuyen Tu Te) by Tran Van Thuy was released in Hanoi.^[27] The film's theme was the search for the meaning of the term tu te, which can mean roughly “decency,” “kindness,” or “appropriateness.” As the filmmaker looked, mostly in vain, for people who lived according to this principle, he came across war veterans whose medals had been earned in battles from Dien Bien Phu (1954) to Khe Sanh (1968) but were now reduced to eking out a living driving pedicabs, repairing bicycles, or peddling vegetables by the roadside. Meanwhile, rich and idle young Vietnamese pursued the good life, which consisted of surrounding themselves with

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consumer goods. The most revealing moments of the film involve two women. One, who in the filmmaker's eyes best represents the meaning of “decency,” is a peasant who was abandoned by her husband and hounded out of her village after she contracted leprosy. Wishing to provide shelter for her small boy in case she died, she had built a house brick by brick with her bare hands, even as her flesh was being eaten away by disease. This is the idealized self-sacrificing mother of popular culture, just as her feckless spouse represents the unreliable male. The film also provides her with an opposite, the grasping wife, who has equally strong roots in popular culture. She is represented by a self-confident, well-to-do urban woman in designer glasses who declares: “In practical terms, kindness nowadays means someone doing you a favor by using either political influence or material wealth. Kindness is an old-fashioned idea that only older people talk about. Today, people are far too busy to discuss outmoded concepts like that.”

This self-regarding young woman has her literary counterpart in the short story “The General Retires” (Tuong Ve Huu) by Nguyen Huy Thiep.^[28] In this story, which created a stir when it was published in 1988, Nguyen Huy Thiep pits a retired general against his daughter-in-law. Their confrontation is narrated in an affectless voice by the general's son, who is supposed to be the head of the family yet does not feel entirely responsible for the welfare of his household. The general symbolizes all the old virtues of the revolution but also its limitations.He clings to the spirit of egalitarianism in the face of growing social stratification. Coming from humble peasant stock, he is uncomfortable among the paraphernalia of middle-class aspirations his son and daughter-in-law are accumulating. He is more at ease with the peasant couple who care for his aged mother than with his own children and grandchildren, who despise his lack of education. Above all, he is made to feel superfluous and he eventually retreats from the domestic battlefield and rejoins his old regiment. The story ends with his son's laconic report that his father has died in battle, presumably in Cambodia.

The old general has been routed from his home (from which he had been absent for decades) by his daughter-in-law, who well deserves the popular nickname of “general of the interior.” She is the epitome of the competent housewife who knows to the last penny how much should be spent on wedding festivities: enough to cut a dash, not so much as to cause financial difficulties. Like her husband, she is well educated and thus a symbol of the postwar preference for knowledge over revolutionary

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virtue. She is also an urban icon. Employed full-time as a physician in a maternity clinic, she augments the family's income by raising German dogs for sale to the nouveaux riches of northern Vietnam who, for the first time in decades, have possessions to protect. Her father-in-law, however, discovers to his horror that she feeds her dogs with aborted fetuses from the clinic. In northern Vietnam, where restaurants selling dog meat are spreading everywhere in the wake of Doi Moi, readers will recognize this as a metaphor for the topsy-turvy state of postwar society, which allows dogs to eat human flesh. Once her father-in-law has expressed revulsion, the wife is forced to stop making use of fetuses as free dog food. She also has to stop raising dogs, since the loss of free food makes this sideline unprofitable. While the old general symbolizes revolutionary morality and the link with the heroic and simpler past, his daughter-in-law embodies the amorality of the market. Yet, like the grieving old women who have been honored by the state, she, too, is a mother. Her children, however, are alive, not dead, and it is her duty to see to their welfare. Popular images of postwar women as ruthless “generals of the interior” obfuscate the responsibilities that a maledominated culture has assigned to them as mothers yet are difficult to fulfill on civil servants'salaries.

The loss of status and income of males in the public sector is captured in the short story “The Waltz of the Chamber Pot” (“Vu Dieu cai Bo”)by Nguyen Quang Than.^[29] The author sets up a humorous but sharp contrast between the poverty-stricken and ineffectual intellectual, the still powerful but obstructive party cadre, and the prosperous and productive (female) entrepreneur with whom both are involved. Although the intellectual is nominally on the payroll of a research institute, there is no money to fund his research, so he has to seek employment in the private sector.He is hired by the woman entrepreneur, supposedly to teach her little boy English, but in reality to be his nursemaid. The chamber pot is thus the symbol of his loss of status and of his fall into a demeaning, feminine occupation. The woman keeps in the good graces of the party cadre because of his remaining political clout but has little use for him personally because he is sexually impotent. Indeed, the only man capable of satisfying this cheerfully hedonistic woman is another (male) entrepreneur who breezes in and out of the story, bringing with him both news of the world outside Vietnam and funds of dubious provenance. The postwar economy, the story seems to imply, has reversed traditional equations between gender and power and has emasculated once powerful males.

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WOMEN IN THE MUSEUM

The multifaceted role of women in society and cultural memory has found expression in the split personalities of the two museums dedicated to women, one in Ho Chi Minh City and the other in Hanoi. The Ho Chi Minh City Museum of Women tries to negotiate the multiplicity of roles that Vietnamese society assigns to women by embracing an allinclusive definition of their identity. Thus, visitors are greeted by a large wall poster that details feminine qualities through the ages:

The Vietnamese women have the tradition of being “heroic, unsubmissive, faithful and competent: which are materialized in various fields of activity: the Vietnamese women fight off the enemy for national salvation. … When it was necessary, Vietnamese women also knew how to rule the country. South Vietnamese women are not only talented producers, creating well-known articles, but are also competent housekeepers, experts in family man-agement, tailoring, embroidery, in cooking tasty meals, making cakes and jams—thus embellishing the life of the family and society.^[30]

The Ho Chi Minh City Museum of Women opened its doors to the public on April 4, 1985, in time to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the fall of Saigon. Established before Doi Moi, it devotes far more space to showcasing women's wartime contributions than does its counterpart in Hanoi, which was inaugurated a full decade later.An official of the Hanoi Museum said, “We think that the Museum of Women of Ho Chi Minh City pays too much attention to war.We want to focus on the role of women in peace.”^[31] By the time the Hanoi Museum of Women opened in November 1995, the great wave of commemoration had largely ebbed, and public interest was refocusing on the present. In the lobby of the museum stands a bronze statue—the winning design in a competition that attracted over fifty entries—of a young mother holding a child aloft on her shoulder. In the words of the museum guide,

The statue is designed to represent the most valuable attributes of womanhood. She is shown with one hand forcing down the forces of disturbance. Her face is full of resolve, her breasts jut out to part the ocean waves. They are full of lifegiving milk.On her shoulder is perched a young child, for it is the responsibility of women to nurture future generations, their most sacred task. The child looks forward to the future, his arms stretched out to embrace all the challenges of life.

Over the statue is a huge chandelier whose lights are “in the shape of milk drops,” reminding spectators once again of the nurturing role of mothers (fig.6.4).A mural will be created as a backdrop for the statue

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when more funds are available.It will show “the river that is formed from the thousands of drops of milk from the mother.” The mural will illustrate not only motherhood but also the popular saying “When drinking water, remember its source” (uong nuoc nho nguon). This popular saying has been widely appropriated by the state to remind the population of its debt toward the revolutionary generation for the sacrifices it made to safeguard independence. In the context of the museum, however, that saying seems stripped of its political message and serves merely as a reminder of the debt owed to mothers in all circumstances.

Instead of trying to integrate women's multiple roles into a single identity, the Hanoi Museum of Women spreads them over three floors. The exhibits begin on the ground floor with celebrations of Vietnamese

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motherhood inspired by religious cults, folk myths, and history. The second floor is devoted to the history of women during the Revolution and the War Against the Americans and to the achievements of the Women's Union to whom the museum belongs. The third floor is given over to women's clothing. Although many of the costumes featured are those of ethnic minorities and thus can be said to have documentary value, the main aim of the exhibits apparently is to catch the eye. Indeed, other exhibits are purely about current fashions. Such is the case of the revolving display that features ao dai by one of Hanoi's top designers and provides the end point of the exhibit. Thus, as one progresses from floor to floor, the image of Vietnamese womanhood shifts from mother, to mature young woman, to young girl; from traditional, self-sacrificing, hardworking, thrifty mother, to courageous peasant guerrilla defending the homeland in wartime, to fashionconscious, bigspending, urban young woman.

In Ho Chi Minh City, the message inside the museum is somewhat more consistent and, as the Hanoi official suggested, more focused on women's revolutionary contributions, in keeping with the state's narrative. Outside, however, the commemorative concerns of the state are being undermined by those of private individuals. Although the museum is open free of charge, it has few visitors and a very small budget.As in other sister institutions in the South, the staff stretches the museum's income by allowing weddings to be held on its lawns and catering banquets.An annex is also used for meetings and dances. When the museum mounted a photographic exhibit in honor of Heroic Mothers in 1995, it flanked the lawn with temporary partitions upon which were affixed photographs of recipients of medals. They were women in their seventies or older, their faces etched with lines of sorrow, and they were invariably clad in drab peasant pajamas.On weekends, wedding parties would assemble in front of the museum for collective photographs. The bride was usually attired in a Victorian dress and the groom in a tuxedo. The pictures of old women who had lost their sons in the war formed a disregarded backdrop for the recording of the bride's passage into marriage and motherhood and the couple's affirmation of their membership in the rising urban, Westernized middle class. In southern towns and villages where museums are unavailable for this purpose, cemeteries to revolutionary martyrs have become a favorite spot for taking bridal pictures. Sites that are meant to commemorate war are thus used as backdrops for the reaffirmation of life and of social continuity. But the life and society they celebrate are very different from the ones that the Revolution

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sought to bring about and that the War Against the Americans was fought to preserve.

CONSUMING OBLIVION

While the state wished to honor those women who had given more than three sons to the revolutionary cause, it was also seeking to enforce its birth control policy, which limited to two the number of children each family was permitted to have.At the beginning of the campaign, the state had emphasized the need to limit population growth in order to create “a stable society and a prosperous country.” By 1996, that patriotic slogan had been replaced by a less publicminded appeal: “Limit yourselves to two children in order to raise them and educate them well.” Such an appeal bespeaks the end of the wartime ethos personified by the Heroic Mothers and the ascendancy of the middle-class culture represented by fictional females and fashion models.It also signifies the declining power of the official epic narrative of glorious war and revolution to inspire.

In Fable for the Year 2000, a play written in 1991 by Le Hung, a young Vietnamese competes with an older man over the right to pass over a bridge. While the old man claims that the privilege of age and the enormous sacrifices his generation has made give him the right of way, the younger man retorts, “What legacy have you left us but dire poverty?”^[32] Discussions of postwar greed and selfishness form a strange contrast to 1920s debates about the collusion between the patriarchal family and colonial rule. In the 1920s, it was young people who, using the image of young girls to represent their own sense of powerlessness, attacked the family as oppressive. Their rebellion combined desire for personal emancipation and commitment to a cause that was both larger and nobler than the family: the liberation of the entire nation. In the 1990s, the tables have turned. Old soldiers, like the retired general of Nguyen Huy Thiep's short story, represent the revolutionary cause and the larger community, while the young mother who is unwilling to subordinate the good of her family to that of the nation represents the current retreat from public-mindedness.

Although Fable for the Year 2000 appears to pit revolutionary memory against postwar oblivion, forgetting comes from many sources and in many guises.It is not simple ingratitude, nor solely a matter of generational differences. For some, it can be a rejection of the epic narrative of national glory bought at the price of immense sacrifice which is at the

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heart of the state's commemorative project. For others, it can be a refusal to falsify the past by internalizing a narrative that is at odds with one's own experience. Public memory, for them, is not a place of respite from official history, but its handmaid.

Forgetting can also be an attempt to keep the past from damaging the present. Memory may be socially constructed.^[33] It may be shaped collectively, but it also defines the nature and boundaries of community on the basis of shared experience and shared sentiment.It is usually evoked, even constructed, in communal settings such as weddings, funerals, or death anniversaries. These are events in which ties of kinship and community are ordinarily reaffirmed through the recitation of personal anecdotes as much as by participation in common rituals. Yet, the divisiveness engendered by war and revolution confronts many Vietnamese with the impossibility of using memory to reinforce family feelings. In the North, the wounds left by the Land Reform program of the 1950s have not completely healed. Novels such as Duong Thu Huong's Paradise of the Blind expose the rifts it caused in individual families.^[34] In the South, both war and revolution are behind the suppression of memory. The difficulty of remembering failure and defeat is only one factor in this suppression.^[35] Whereas many overseas Vietnamese mark April 30 as the Day of Shame (Ngay Quoc Han), in counterpoint to the Vietnamese state's celebration of victory and reunification, those who remain in Vietnam but fought against Communism do not have the luxury of publicly holding their own rites of remembrance. But southern forgetting is not merely a case of individual memory collapsing under the weight of state suppression. Practically every southern family has members who fought on different sides of the Vietnam War and whose sufferings are therefore blamed on different agents. Every memory calls forth a countermemory: stories of imprisonment under the South Vietnamese regime are countered by narratives of experience in reeducation camps under the new Communist one. Anecdotes celebrating heroic deeds in guerrilla bases are met with tales of tragic death on the high seas while trying to escape the country. Some extended families have members who bear the scars of torture and others who have been accused of inflicting torture on prisoners. Satisfaction at the outcome of the War Against the Americans (as its supporters call it) clashes with nostalgia for the prosperity and freedom of the pre-Communist era as others remember it. Sometimes the division of war is not spread across a large extended family but has to be accommodated within a single individual. Some mothers who have been honored because their sons

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died in the revolutionary cause had others sons who fought in the Armed Forces of the Republic of Vietnam, and died in the war or suffered in its aftermath. While those who fought against the French, the Americans, or the South Vietnamese government are interred in cemeteries devoted to revolutionary heroes, the remains of those who fought on the other side in the Armed Forces of the Republic of Vietnam had to be taken away when its military cemetery was razed after 1975. Only the suppression of memories such as these makes possible the continuation of family life, family sentiment, and even personal sanity.

Thus, for the sake of family harmony, southern dead, absent from national commemoration, often go unmentioned in the collective narratives of their extended families. Condemned to the shadows, they refuse, however, to remain unmourned. Their demand to be recognized, however, threatens the peace of the community at the level of family, community, and nation. The destruction of the cemetery has fed popular stories of ghosts who wander along the highway where it used to be located and disturb the living, as do the wandering ghosts of popular culture who must be appeased by rituals of remembrance in the seventh month.

Bequests sometimes carry with them bitter memories.As the narrator of Paradise of the Blind recognizes, “Forgive me my aunt: I'm going to sell this house and leave all this behind.We can honor the wishes of the dead with a few flowers on a grave somewhere.I can't squander my life tending these faded flowers, these shadows, the legacy of past crimes.”^[36] New acquisitions, by contrast, come without the burden of memory.It is this dimension that makes them so desirable as building blocks in a new family narrative that is not made up of loss, grief, and divisive bitterness.

The consumer culture is stripping many symbols of war service of their commemorative shadows. The magazine Phu Nu (Women), which is published by the Ho Chi Minh City Women's Union, is full of articles about fashion. In June 1995, when commemorative activities were at their height, it ran an article on hats. The magazine cover featured a model who was too young to have been born while the War Against the Americans was being fought. She was wearing a black sleeveless silk top with a mandarin collar and frog closings, which managed to be reminiscent all at once of the black pajamas worn by peasants and guerrillas and of the Western fashion fad known as “Indochic.” On her head was a pith helmet. Colored green to provide jungle camouflage, this had once been a useful piece of military attire. Repainted shocking pink to attract

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attention, it had become a frivolous item of feminine decoration.It was an eye-catching illustration of the ability of the market to transform war memorabilia into transient fashion.

The complexity of women's representational roles in Vietnamese public culture should not obscure the fact that women have real lives that are infinitely more complex, and that women's images and women's lives are sometimes in conflict. Political liberalization made possible more open discussion of war and of women's experiences in war; it accompanied the transition to a market economy in which many women, especially the peasant women who contributed the most to the war effort, are losing ground. Thanks to the new openness, the picture of wartime gender equality is being modified.^[37] Meanwhile, their postwar circumstances are leading some women to rethink their sacrifices. The Heroic Mothers, icons of revolutionary memory, are often forgotten as real individuals.At the end of 1995, a published survey disclosed that half a million women were living alone without children to support them. Because this coincided with the tail end of the festivities honoring Heroic Mothers, it led to discussions in the press of the plight of women whose children had died in the war and were now destitute.It was disclosed that some women, including war veterans, were opting to have children outside marriage because they had little or no hope of finding a husband, yet wanted to experience motherhood and to provide a modicum of security for their old age.^[38] And while fictional female entrepreneurs seemed to be gaining in power and status in the new market-driven society, the press was also full of articles concerning young peasant women who had been lured into the cities by prospects of jobs in the private sector only to fall into prostitution.

Winners and losers in the market economy, young and old, grieving and forwardlooking, selfsacrificing and hedonistic, icons of memory, symbols of forgetting; women embody the dilemmas and contradictions that are involved in making sense of war and postwar, revolution and counterrevolution in Vietnam.

NOTES

This chapter is a revised version of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Honolulu, March 1996.

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7. Contests of Memory

Remembering and Forgetting War
in the Contemporary Vietnamese Cinema

Mark Philip Bradley

In a modest house in a residential quarter of Hanoi, an elderly mother says good-bye to the guests attending the rituals surrounding the death anniversary (ngay gio) for her son who was killed in the American War. After the last guests depart, she collapses onto the floor crying and calls out for her family to assemble around her. Reminding her children that their brother's bones are still lying in a military cemetery in the South, she implores them to bring his remains home so that she can lie next to him when she dies. Her son agrees, adding, “Thank heaven my sister has so many connections.” His observation prompts an increasingly acrimonious exchange between his sister and his wife:

SISTER:

Shouldn't we all help? I'm busy with my husband's business trip to Singapore. You both have never seen Saigon. You could combine business with a little sight-seeing.

WIFE:

My husband is busy with the shop, and I'm taking care of mother. You have more time.

SISTER:

I'll talk straight. You joined this family. Help take care of it. You got my brother's room because he died.

WIFE:

And you got some of mother's gold. We don't get paid for taking care of her.

SISTER:

I had to borrow that gold to grease a few wheels.

WIFE:

Our family has special status because our brother got killed. That's why they let you pass your exam and get a job in Hanoi.

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SISTER:

You're wrong. I got that another way. But it is through family status that they don't close your store!

WIFE:

Look at my husband. He can't go. I don't know my way around the South. How could we exhume the bones?

SISTER:

You think I'm good at it? It is hard enough to take care of my husband and his family. It's expensive to transport bones. Where would I get the money?

MOTHER (CRYING):

Stop it! All of you. You're so ungrateful to the dead. But you were quick enough to use our new family status. My son, if only you hadn't died in the South. Let me try to find the bones! If I die trying, none of you will care. As for the money, are these packets enough? If not, let's sell the furniture, the house. But I must bring my son's remains home.

Offering a solution to this impasse, the sister suggests that her husband's brother, an unemployed veteran, could use the money and go on behalf of the family. The veteran agrees but refuses the money. The sister tells him, “Stop living in the clouds. No one is like you now—doing something for nothing.” The veteran replies, “Your brother died asking for nothing.”

This painful symbolic representation of the tensions between remembering and forgetting the American War in contemporary northern Vietnamese society, which formed the core of Tran Vu and Nguyen Huu Luyen's 1987 film, Brothers and Relations (Anh va Em), was a sharp and highly unusual challenge to the official memories of war carefully constructed by the Vietnamese state throughout the wars against the French and the Americans and in their aftermath. The official narrative of sacred war (chien tranh than thanh) celebrated the heroic resistance of soldiers, workers, and peasants in an effort to infuse a larger meaning onto the suffering and death caused by war and to legitimate the state's twin goals of national liberation and socialist revolution. Many of the archetypal figures in the state cults of remembrance are present in Brothers and Relations. The sanctified memory of the fallen soldier, the probity of the simple veteran, and the self-sacrificing heroic mother all occupy a central place in the official pantheon of revolutionary heroes as symbols of selfless patriotic and socialist virtue. But in Brothers and Relations they function quite differently, standing in sharp contrast to the self-seeking daughter and her family intent upon using for their own advancement the special privileges granted by the state because of their brother's death in battle. For the filmmakers, the family's unwillingness to honor their brother's memory comes to represent the wider

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ingratitude, inequity, selfishness, and immorality they attribute to postwar Vietnamese society, in which the state's wartime promises of socialist revolution remain unfulfilled.

Brothers and Relations is one of a number of revisionist films released in the mid-1980s that transformed the shape and content of historical memory in contemporary northern Vietnam. The Vietnamese state had employed film, with its power to capture a particularly broad audience, along with such popular cultural forms of remembrance as war memorials and museums, novels, poetry, paintings, and commemorative rituals honoring the war dead and their families to disseminate its construction of war. In appropriating one of these key mediums, the revisionist films of the 1980s articulated a form of what Michel Foucault termed “counter-memory,”^[1] the residual or resistant strains of remembrance embedded in popular consciousness that withstand official constructions of the historical past.

The films appeared in a period that favored the advancement of a contrapuntal representation of war in Vietnam. The embrace of market economic reforms at the Sixth Party Congress of the Vietnamese Communist Party in 1986 brought with it a significant loosening of state control in the cultural realm. As one scholar of this period has argued, the policy of Renovation (Doi Moi) in the arts allowed intellectuals to work with a degree of freedom unknown since the Popular Front period in colonial Vietnam in the late 1930s.^[2] But if official censorship relaxed somewhat, so, too, did the state subsidies for the arts that had provided the single source of funding for the Vietnamese film industry. The demands of the market economy put new pressures on filmmakers to ensure that the content of the films they produced resonated with potential filmgoers.^[3]

Emboldened by this new climate of artistic freedom and market incentives, the works of revisionist filmmakers mounted a powerful, if sometimes oblique, narrative challenge to official memories of the Vietnamese experience of the war and attracted large, appreciative audiences.^[4] They posed several farreaching questions that undermined the central premises on which the state's memorializing project had rested. Who rightfully possesses the memory of fallen soldiers? Whose wartime sacrifice is deserving of commemoration? And what are the real legacies of war? In framing their responses, filmmakers consciously rejected the prevailing aesthetics of socialist realism that had governed Vietnamese cinema and given shape to the state's heroic narrative of war. In its place they made use of a diverse repertoire of rich visual imagery that reached back to ritual forms of family and village life long suppressed by the

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state, the metaphorical and subversive uses of gender in traditional literary idioms, and the discursive strategies of anticolonial political discourse familiar to much of their intended audience. Reversing and supplanting many of the symbolic meanings the state ascribed to war, the revisionist films of the 1980s reveal the contours of the contested articulation of war remembrance in contemporary northern Vietnam.^[5]

WHO RIGHTFULLY POSSESSES THE MEMORY
OF FALLEN SOLDIERS?

The fallen soldier is perhaps the most potent symbol of official efforts to commemorate and legitimate the national experience of war. As George Mosse argues in his seminal account of state memorializing practices in Europe in the aftermath of World War I, the body of the soldier killed in battle came to transcend death and was increasingly linked to the highest aspirations of patriotic nationalism. Images of the fallen soldier in the arms of Christ, Mosse asserts, “projected the traditional belief in martyrdom and resurrection onto the nation as an all-encompassing civic religion.”^[6] Central to the European statesponsored cult of the fallen soldier was the construction of war monuments and military cemeteries that functioned both as shrines of national worship and as physical symbols of the superior claims made by the state on the memories of those who died in battle.

The development of memorial holidays and specially designed cemeteries by the Vietnamese state to render the death of soldiers as symbols of national revolutionary martyrdom mirrors key aspects of these interwar European practices. Like its counterparts in Europe, the Vietnamese state sought to own the memory of its war dead, an effort most starkly revealed in the official memorial services organized by local party cadres. Here a fallen solder's sacrifice for the state and revolution, rather than this relationship to his lineage or village, served to exclusively define the meaning of his life and death.^[7]

Fallen soldiers occupy a central place in the symbolic vocabulary of many of the revisionist films of the 1980s, but they are used to subvert rather than affirm the scaffolding of official memories erected by the state and to stake a claim for the primacy of individuals and civil society as the rightful heirs to memories of the war dead.^[8] Brothers and Relations places the remains of the fallen soldier at the center of its withering critique of an amnesic postwar Vietnamese society (fig. 7.1). At the end of the film, the veteran encounters his brother and his wife in the parking lot of the airport outside of Hanoi as he returns from his trip to recover

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her brother's remains. Before he can speak, the wife giddily informs him they are off to Singapore for their muchanticipated business trip. When he tells her that the small box he is carrying contains the remains of her brother, she absentmindedly nods and quickly asks their driver to pull away because they are late for their flight. The scene shifts to a crude hand-marked grave in a rocky grotto near a rushing stream. Against the accompaniment of swelling traditional music, the veteran's voice addresses the fallen soldier: “Your sisters are busy. I won't take you back to them. Your mother will be sad, but she will understand. Stay here. This new place is your home.” In a society indifferent to the memories of fallen soldiers, the filmmakers suggest, the monopolizing claims of state commemorative practices no longer hold significance. Only on the marginal bounds of civil society can they be infused with a new, more private and resonant meaning.

Nguyen Xuan Son's 1987 film, Fairy Tale for Seventeen-Year-Olds (Truyen Co Tich cho Tuoi 17), appropriates official memories of the fallen soldier in gentler but nonetheless subversive ways. The film tells the story of a young student, An, who falls in love with a soldier when she sees his picture and hears his mother read from his letters written from the front. An and the soldier never meet, but their tender relationship emerges through letters they exchange with each other and in a series of dream sequences in which the young girl encounters the spectral figures of the soldier and his regiment, who appear to be taking shelter from the war in a dark cave. An's love for the soldier meets severe official disapproval as a violation of the wartime imperative of collective selfsacrifice. In an early scene, her teacher asks An's class to prepare an

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essay on a poem “depicting the image of a revolutionary you like best.” When An offers an appreciation of a poem about a revolutionary's love for a young girl, her teacher gives her a low mark, telling her she should have discussed a poem that portrayed his revolutionary determination. Later, when the teacher realizes that An herself is in love with a young soldier, she holds a “self-criticism” session in which she and An's class-mates tell An that her behavior is inappropriate and disruptive to the spirit of her class.

In contrast to these official judgments, Fairy Tale for Seventeen-Year-Olds concentrates on the approving support An receives for her love of the soldier from her father and the soldier's mother. For both of them, the war has taken a deeply personal toll. Her father is a veteran of the French war whose wife died of grief after going years without word of the fate of their son, who apparently died in battle. He tells An her relationship with the soldier is a “fairy tale” but indulgently advises her to continue it as she is too young to know the “realities of war.” The soldier's mother, Mrs. Thu, a political cadre whose own husband was killed in battle during the war against the French, also affirms An's love for her son, sharing his letters with her and urging An to write to him in return.

The film ends on the day of Hanoi's victory in the American War. Just before Mrs. Thu is to give a victory day speech in the courtyard of An's school, she receives a telegram with the news that her son was killed in one of the war's final battles. As she gives her speech celebrating “the heroic sacrifices that won us victory from the American imperialists,” the pain in her face betrays the more personal meaning of her son's death and the memory of her husband. She tells An's father later, “I never thought I would experience such grief on this day of our victory,” to which he replies, “We've won independence at the cost of young lives.” In its focus on the human dimension of a soldier's life and death, Fairy Tale for Seventeen-Year-Olds suggests the necessity of a more intimate interpretation of the memory of fallen soldiers than the one put forward through the state's commemorative practices to provide essential consolations for the private sacrifices of war. As the young girl An says in the final frames of the film after she comes to know of her lover's death, “My love made me happy. I want to retain that happiness … to know nothing but my beautiful fairy tale.”

Perhaps the most complex exploration of the question of who right-fully possesses the memory of fallen soldiers emerged in Dang Nhat Minh's 1984 film, When the Tenth Month Comes (Bao Gio cho den

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Thang Muoi), the first of the revisionist films to be released in Vietnam. Dang Nhat Minh, one of the most popular and influential filmmakers in Vietnam, set the film during the Vietnamese invasion of Pol Pot's Cambodia in 1979. This decision may have reflected the skeptical response of a warweary population to the state's efforts to render the Vietnamese invasion and subsequent occupation of Cambodia (1979–89) within the official narrative of war as patriotic self-sacrifice, particularly when the state appeared unable to find employment in the civilian sector for demobilized veterans returning from the Cambodian campaigns. It is likely that the Cambodian setting of the film, which was released two years before the rise of the Renovation agenda eased state controls on filmmakers, also provided Dang Nhat Minh with a thinly disguised parable to advance his critique of state memorializing practices in a manner that implicated but did not directly challenge the more sacrosanct claims of official narratives of the French and American Wars.

When the Tenth Month Comes tells the story of the decision of a young woman named Duyen to keep the news that her husband was killed in battle hidden from her husband's family and village. By the end of the film Duyen comes to know that her behavior is improper. Kneeling next to the deathbed of her husband's father, she cries out, “I haven't told the truth. … I'vedone wrong.” From the state's perspective, the nature of Duyen's error would have been obvious: she prevented her husband's memory from fulfilling its officially sanctioned commemorative purposes. At points the film does acknowledge the legitimacy of state claims on the fallen soldier's memory. Early in the film the father of Duyen's husband calls the death of his elder son during the American War a “patriotic sacrifice for the advancement of the national liberation movement and the socialist revolution.” Similarly, the final scene of the film after the dead soldier's family and village have come to know of his wife's deception appears to suggest the official order has been restored. As martial music swells, Duyen's son and his teacher, surrounded by children carrying party banners, gaze admiringly upward at the yellow star and red background of the Vietnamese flag snapping purposefully in the wind. But these rather perfunctory scenes are oddly disconnected from the larger narrative of the film, better reflecting a bow to the very real concerns of continuing state censorship rather than a full embrace of official commemorative practices.

The film concentrates on the impact of the war on the interior lives of Duyen and her husband's family. When the state intrudes on their

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experiences, it is often represented in highly critical ways that undermine its memorializing pretensions. The least sympathetic characters in the film are two local party cadres, a sister of Duyen's husband and her husband. From their first appearance, arriving late for the death anniversary of the sister's mother in a serious breach of traditional filial etiquette, they are portrayed as vain, self-important, and grasping for power and position. Later the sister tells the heroine she should get her brother out of the army because she could find him a safer civilian position. “You two,” she adds patronizingly, “just don't know how to get ahead.” The film offers a more indirect critique of the state through the character of the village schoolteacher who aids Duyen in her deceptions by drawing a revealing parallel between the teacher's efforts to help the heroine hold on to her husband's memory and a radical shift in meaning of the poem he writes that gives the film its title. In an early scene the schoolteacher reads the first few lines of the poem to a friend— “When the Ten Month comes / The rice will be harvested in the fields / A full five tons rich in yield” —and says that Literature and Arts (Van Nghe), the leading literary journal in Hanoi, has promised to publish it with some changes. “Isn't it good enough as it is?” the friend asks. “Not quite realistic enough,” he replies. “Productivity is up to seven or eight tons now.” By the end of the film the schoolteacher has redrafted the poem, but instead of a socialist realist paean to rice production, it deals with how an individual can mediate the sorrow and pain of a loved one's death.

By contrast with the film's portrayal of the state, its depiction of Duyen's multiple social roles as wife, opera singer, and widow lends her character a surprisingly sympathetic form despite the evident disapproval of her actions. Duyen's relationship to her husband's family and village is clearly that of an outsider. Within Vietnamese patrilineal familial custom an in-law is “outside” (ngoai), a term used to describe nonpatrilineal kin and suggestive of the secondary role a wife occupies in her husband's family. As an opera singer and a former member of a traveling theatrical troupe, Duyen is also connected to a social group viewed with some ignominy in northern Vietnamese society as an alien presence that should properly remain apart from the closed formal structures of village life.^[9]

In part Duyen's marginal and vulnerable position in her husband's family and village provides Dang Nhat Minh with a more impressionable and less dangerous agent for launching his critique of state claims on the memory of fallen soldiers than if he had chosen to center the film

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on one of the exemplary and resolute heroes and heroines of official memories of war. Duyen's social position as an outsider in her husband's family also allows her to occupy a symbolic role that is familiar to Vietnamese audiences and particularly well suited to the film's exploration of the more intimate and localized meanings of a soldier's death; the wife who brings dissension to her husband's family serves as a universally recognized trope in traditional Vietnamese folktales and literature for the competitive dangers conjugal relations can pose to the natural primacy of blood ties. The respect the film accords to Duyen's unfathomable grief as a widow mourning the death of her husband, however, ultimately lifts her character above these familiar social types. Its compassionate portrayal of Duyen's predicament emerges most affectingly in a scene of a village opera performance. Singing of the plight of a soldier's wife and her devotion to her husband, Duyen collapses on stage, overcome by the emotional parallels to her own situation.

But if the narrative of When the Tenth Month Comes at times accords Duyen an empathetic place, its broader focus remains a critical examination of the transgressions Duyen acknowledges at the end of the film and the path through which she comes to know her behavior is wrong. The film concentrates on Duyen's failure to fulfill her filial duties to her husband's family and his lineage and her moral obligations to his village in a manner that subtly undermines the state's monopolizing claims on the memory of her dead husband. It articulates its disapproval of Duyen's actions in a crucial scene in which the family of her husband observe the death anniversary of her husband's mother. At the culminating feast marking the anniversary, one family member reads a letter full of filial devotion purportedly written by the heroine's husband. The letter, however, is actually a fabricated one, written at Duyen's request by the village schoolteacher as a way of convincing the family that her husband remains alive.

When Duyen uses a death anniversary at which the soul of the departed ancestor is believed to be present to advance her deception, her actions emerge as a particularly egregious violation of traditional Vietnamese practices of remembering and propitiating the memory of the dead. The rites of the death anniversary, one leading scholar of these practices argues, are essential to affirming the primary familial obligations of filial piety (hieu), “symbolically joining the living, dead and yet to be born members of the family … inan intimate relationship of mutual dependency.”^[10] The visual dynamics of the scene sharpen the contrast between Duyen's serious breach of familial norms and the proper

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behavior of the people who surround her. As Duyen cowers in the shadowy corners of the frame, seemingly both fearful that the letter will not be believed and ashamed of what she has done, her husband's family demonstrate their respectful attitude toward the soul of the mother by dutifully undertaking the ritual practices that make up the formal observations of a death anniversary.

The film's particular concentration on the feasting component of the death anniversary also reinforces its focus on the claims of family and village, rather than the state, on the memory of Duyen's husband. The feast marking the death anniversary, in which a family traditionally invited its neighbors in the village to share, was among the central targets of a sustained campaign by the state against superstitious practices in northern Vietnam after its rise to power in 1945. For the state, the elaborate network of social exchange promoted through the feast both incurred wasted expenditure better used for collective economic purposes and represented undesirable feudal customs that promoted social inequality and status competition. In its place, the state promoted a simple didactic ceremony among the immediate family of the deceased that focused on the departed ancestor's contribution to the rise of a new revolutionary society. Dang Nhat Minh's inclusion of the feast in his depiction of the rites of the death anniversary, which reflects the very real return of such traditional ritual practices in northern Vietnamese society in the 1980s, pointedly places the memory of the dead within the world of the village community and suggests that Duyen's deceptions most importantly violate familial and village rather than state norms.^[11]

Significantly, When the Tenth Month Comes guides Duyen toward the self-knowledge that her deception injures her husband's family and village through a series of conversations with the spirit world. This marks another conscious break with the state's insistence on empirically verifiable solutions to human problems rather than recourse to the metaphysical realm that was at the core of its campaigns against superstitious practices. In one of several dream sequences, which draw upon a common traditional belief that the spirits of the ancestors can appear in dreams to warn of approaching calamities, Duyen meets the village guardian spirit (thanh hoang), who tells her he is “a husband like yours who followed a famous king to repel the Mongol invaders from the North,” a reference to the thirteenth-century Mongol invasion of Vietnam. While the state consciously sought to appropriate these ubiquitous village cults to legitimize its prosecution of the wars against the French and the Americans within what it termed the “timeless tradition of

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patriotic resistance against foreign aggression,” the guardian spirit in the film speaks to a more localized meaning of the cults as a symbolic protector of village welfare and the focal point for village ritual life.^[12] He tells Duyen her husband now lives in the “heart of the village,” which gives his spirit power and meaning. Only by sharing the memory of her husband with the village, he suggests, will she find peace.

Later the films uses an encounter with the spirit of Duyen's husband to provide the vehicle through which she comes to appreciate the significance of his family's claims on his memory and her obligation to them. The meeting takes place at what the film calls the “Day of Buddha's Forgiveness,” an event Duyen's grandmother recalls as a practice from the “olden days” in which “the dead could meet the living in a midsummer market.” Coming upon her husband, she notes his sadness and asks, “Is there something that needs atonement?” Her husband tells her: “I've done my duty. The living should make each other happy.” “Father thinks you will still return,” Duyen tells him. “Let him be peaceful in his own mind,” he replies. “He and I will meet again.” Her husband's gentle rebuke serves as a reminder of the spiritual dilemmas that Duyen's transgression of filial norms poses for his family. Without the knowledge that their son has died, they are of course unable to properly honor his memory. But an unpropitiated death, according to traditional Vietnamese beliefs, can threaten the family in a number of ways, turning the dead family member into a restless and potentially malignant spirit who can bring ill fortune to the family. Duyen's encounter with her husband at the Day of Buddha's Forgiveness, a loosely fictionalized version of the Buddhist Feast of Wandering Souls (Ngay Xa Toi Vong Hon), in which village communities traditionally sought to pacify the souls of those who had no one to remember them, suggests her actions have wrongfully placed her husband's spirit in a potentially dangerous sacred space. In urging Duyen to give his father peace, a request approvingly rendered by the film, Duyen's husband reminds her of the primary ties of kinship and the urgency of restoring the proper order of familial remembrance for the dead.

This narrative unfolding of Duyen's journey toward selfknowledge through the spirit world is punctuated by the frequent appearance of a small paper kite, which in the end serves as the film's most potent symbol of her husband's ties to his family and village community and the transcendent claims they make on his memory. The kite makes its first appearance in an early scene in which Duyen recalls a visit she and her

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husband made to the shrine of the village guardian spirit shortly before he left to join the army. At the shrine her husband burns a paper kite as an offering to the guardian spirit in a further inversion of statesanctioned practices that banned the burning of paper votive items (hang ma) to propitiate the spirit world. Throughout the rest of the film, the kite is linked to Duyen's husband, whose father proudly claims that his son was the “best kite flyer in the village.” Kite flying occupied a particular ritual significance during the tenth month or harvest season, which provides the setting for the film, as a representation of the sun. The kite's oppositional movements to and fro mimicked the sun's movements in the sky and formed a part of traditional agricultural rites that sought to bring the rain and sun necessary for a full rice harvest.^[13] Within this context, the acknowledged kiteflying prowess of Duyen's husband suggests the high esteem in which he was held by his family and the essential role he played in the ritual lives of the village.

Shortly before the end of the film, and the approaching harvest, Duyen and her young son appear on a hillside joyfully flying a paper kite like the one her husband had offered to the village guardian spirit. In that single image—the kite sweeping and arching over the landscape but tethered to the earth by the string the boy holds—the film depicts the soaring spirit of Duyen's husband, whose relationship to the world below gains its meaning through the inviolable bonds of family and community. If fears of continuing state censorship may have prompted Dang Nhat Minh to formally close his film with a reprise of socialist realist imagery that supports official claims on Duyen's husband, When the Tenth Month Comes suggests that at the very least the state must share the memory of the fallen soldier with his widow, his family, and his village.^[14]

WHOSE WARTIME SACRIFICES
DESERVE COMMEMORATION?

Along with their sweeping challenge to official claims on the memory of fallen soldiers, the revisionist films of the 1980s also focused on the postwar betrayal of the broader scope of the Vietnamese state's commemoration of war. Throughout the wartime period, the state celebrated individual acts of self-sacrifice by patriotic workers and peasants, heroic mothers, children and grandparents, and revolutionary cadres and soldiers. If their contributions fell short of the ultimate sacrifice of

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death in battle, they nonetheless occupied a central place in the official narrative of war as a collective struggle for national liberation and socialist revolution.

Film was a particularly important means through which the state imparted the commemorative meanings it gave to the sacrifices of these social groups. The first featurelength Vietnamese film, On the Same River (Chung Mot Dong Song), ^[15] told the story of two young lovers, divided by the river that formed the boundary between northern and southern Vietnam in the Geneva Accords, who put aside the individual sorrows of their frustrated love to fight for the reunification of the country and ideals of socialism. It set the tone for filmmaking during the war and in its aftermath, including such wellknown films as The Fledgling (Chim Vanh Khuyen), in which a little girl is killed in her attempts to warn a revolutionary cadre of an impending enemy ambush; Coal Season (Mua Than), set among coal miners in the North who overcome constant bombardment by American jets to produce the coal needed for the war effort; and When Mother Is Absent (Me Vang Nha), which focused on a mother and her five children who responsibly take care of each other at home while their mother fights the enemy on the battle-field.^[16] This commemorative rendering in film emerged most fully in the 1965 documentary Victory at Dien Bien Phu (Chien Thang Dien Bien Phu), ^[17] released to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the French defeat at the climactic battle of the first Indochina war. Crosscutting between black-and-white footage of the battle itself and vignettes that celebrated individual acts of heroism by soldiers in battle and by peasants and workers on the home front, the film presented what it called the “spirit of Dien Bien Phu” as a didactic lesson of the necessity of collective self-sacrifice to successfully realize “the struggle against American imperialists for independence, for the land of the peasants, for socialism.”

Many of the revisionist films of the 1980s undermined these larger commemorative pretensions of the Vietnamese state. Depicting a postwar world in which the patriotic and revolutionary figures celebrated in official memory occupied a marginal, often forgotten, place in society, they called into question the state's ability to honor the wartime sacrifices of its people and to sustain the foundational myths of the war experience through which it sought to legitimate its power and authority. The betrayal of wartime sacrifices emerges as a particularly important theme in three of these films. Tran Van Thuy's 1987 documentary, How to Behave (Cau Chuyen Tu Te), opens with historical footage of

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brave revolutionary men and women on the attack that could have been drawn from any number of wartime films. At the same time, the narrator self-consciously admits the culpability of filmmakers in advancing the state's memorializing project: “Our films were unworthy because we didn't dare say what we thought and unimportant because no one wanted the films we could make.” He insists that How to Behave will instead explore the everyday lives of ordinary people in contemporary Hanoi. The film does so in a manner that belies the commemorative promises of the official wartime narrative. Among the individuals profiled in the film are several decorated veterans of the French and American Wars who barely eke out a subsistence living for their families as cyclo drivers and bicycle repairmen and whose proud memories of their contributions to the war effort are now largely ignored by the state (figs.7.2 and 7.3).

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The veteran at the center of Brothers and Relations occupies a similarly peripheral place within his family and in postwar society. From the outset of the film, when the veteran returns to his home in Hanoi, he receives little understanding or appreciation from his family for his experiences in war. Ringing the bell upon his arrival, he is first greeted by a young woman who does not know him but now occupies his former rooms, which his family had rented out believing him to be dead. Confused, he rings again and this time awakens his brother's sleeping wife. Annoyed that someone is at their gate early on a Sunday morning, she asks her husband to receive the caller, but he is preoccupied with collecting the eggs his hens had laid the night before and so refuses. Finally the wife answers the bell. Astonished to see the veteran, she gives him a forced smile that only slightly masks her underlying anxiety that his return will upset the household's economic arrangement with their

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boarders. After a brief and somewhat torpid reunion in which his brother's wife emphasizes that the ration book he received as a demobilized veteran makes him “worth a lot,” the family returns to its everyday life in which the veteran is alternately ignored or chastised for his inability to find a job and reduce the economic burden his presence places upon them.

The cool reception that the veteran receives from his family is replicated in his encounters with society at large. Potential employers insist they cannot offer him a position because he does not have proper training in a trade; they remain unmoved when he explains he was drafted before he could enter vocational school. Unable to find a job, he passes much of his time with other unemployed veterans in seedy cafe´s frequented by prostitutes. But here, too, the veteran tells his few friends he “just doesn't fit in.”

By focusing on the indifference the veteran encounters from his family and society, Brothers and Relations points to the state's larger failure to honor the wartime contributions of soldiers and its inability to honor its commemorative ideals in the postwar period. In one revealing exchange the veteran's brother says that his failure to find a job “betrays their father's trust,” to which the veteran tells his seemingly uncompre-hending brother: “Betray? You don't think joining the guerrillas for so many years, fighting, not running away, with a bullet in my body is honorable. I come back and look for a job so I won't be a parasite. But if you lack a diploma and have a mind that won't do anything right, you might as well be dead.” In the end, the film suggests, the returning veteran can find a place for himself and his own memories of war only on the margins of society. A chance encounter with his old platoon leader, a kindly and trustworthy figure who has made a quiet life for himself in a small coastal fishing village, convinces the veteran to do the same. Surrounded by the platoon leader's warm and empathetic family, the veteran comes to enjoy an Arcadian existence that the film poses as a virtuous antithesis to the ills of forgetfulness of the rest of contemporary society.

The most probing and critical examination of the state's betrayal of the ideals it had so painstakingly cultivated through official commemorations of war emerges in a second film by Dang Nhat Minh, Girl on the River (Go Gai tren Song), released in 1987. The film opens with a young woman in a hospital who is telling her life story to a woman journalist. The first third of the film flashes back to the period of the American War, when the young woman had been a prostitute in Hue

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operating one of the small wooden boat/brothels on the Perfume River that serviced the officers and enlisted men of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). One night a wounded Communist cadre who seeks refuge on her boat from a pursuing ARVN patrol awakens her. She hides him from the prying eyes of the patrol officers, tends his wounds, and the following day takes him farther down the river, an action that allows him to escape his ARVN pursuers. The film makes clear both the substantial dangers involved in helping the cadre and the close, though nonsexual, bond that develops between him and the prostitute in the short time they spend together. Once the cadre has escaped, she dreams of his future as a heroic resistance fighter.

After the war's end, the young woman realizes the cadre has survived the war and become an important provincial government official. She makes efforts to see him at his office to renew their friendship and seek his assistance. Her papers, however, reveal her to be a former prostitute who had served time in a reeducation camp after the war, and she is refused admittance to him. But while the man's factotums refuse her request because of her “class background,” they remain unaware of her earlier relationship with their boss. The former prostitute leaves, assuming that the cadre himself did not refuse her request. By chance shortly thereafter, the cadre's car is stopped because of road construction. On the construction crew laying piles of asphalt is the prostitute, who immediately recognizes the cadre and approaches his car. In a long, painful scene she circles the car without speaking while the cadre ignores her, gazing straight ahead, almost through her. Devastated by this treatment, she leaves work that day, dazed, and is hit by a truck as she walks down a country road. Recovering from the injuries in a hospital, she encounters the woman journalist to whom she has been telling her story.

Neither the young woman nor the journalist realizes the cadre is the husband of the journalist. Indeed, the journalist is puzzled when her husband responds unsympathetically to her interest in publishing the story (he of course realizes the story is about him and worries that if the connection were revealed it could harm his position). The journalist begins to encounter obstacles to publishing her story, again unaware that her husband is using his connections to make sure it is not printed. Told by her editor that the story will not be published, she threatens to resign her position. When she returns home and tells her husband what she has done, he explodes, not only revealing that the story was about him but also criticizing her for giving up her position and for endangering his career.

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If the basic structure of the plot serves to reveal the betrayals and hypocrisies of official commemoration of wartime sacrifice, understanding Dang Nhat Minh's decision to use a prostitute as the heroine is essential to decoding the multiple meanings of the film and how Vietnamese audiences might have apprehended it. The sympathy and quiet heroism he accords to the prostitute and his implicit criticism of the cadre's postwar behavior overturn some of the state's most fundamental political assumptions. During the war, the prostitute often served as a symbol of the corruption and immorality the North Vietnamese state attributed to the South Vietnamese government. In the immediate post-war period, party rhetoric called for the eradication of prostitution in the South because it was inimical to what it termed the “human dignity” of women and the “moral integrity” of the new “socialist man.” Prostitutes, like others associated with the southern regime, were to be made over into socialist men and women, a decision that helps explain why the film's heroine had been sent to a reeducation camp.^[18]

Yet Girl on the River offers the prostitute as a symbol of loyalty and principle to reveal the absence of those qualities in the socialist regime. It emphasizes the contrast between the behavior of the prostitute and the cadre in a scene late in the film. After his angry attack on his wife, the cadre goes to the hospital hoping to see the girl (though whether to affect a reconciliation or silence her is not clear). She has already been released, but as the cadre looks around her empty room and at the white sheets of her bed, he suddenly imagines a stain of red blood on the sheets. A new bride traditionally presented blood-stained silk squares after the wedding night to her husband's kin as proof of her virginity; what the cadre has been visualizing, therefore, is nothing less than the prostitute's essential purity.

Dang Nhat Minh's use of the prostitute as a self-sacrificing patriot also has a deeper resonance in traditional Vietnamese literary culture. Most Vietnamese are familiar with the story of Tay Thi (Ch. Hsi shi), a young woman who in popular legend is credited with assuring the victory of the king of Yu¨eh over the king of Wu during the period of the Warring States (403–221 b.c.). After the king of Wu defeated the kingdom of Yu¨eh, believed to be the embryonic precursor of the Vietnamese state, the king of Yu¨eh presented Tay Thi to the Wu court. A woman of transcendent beauty—the T'ang poet Li Po called her “luminous, ravishing, a light on the sea of clouds” —Tay Thi was reportedly educated in the feminine arts at the Yu¨eh court for the purposes of corrupting the king of Wu. Distracted by Tay Thi's beauty and charms, the

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tale continues, the king of Wu became less vigilant, enabling the Yu¨eh many years later to avenge their defeat and destroy the kingdom of Wu.^[19]

The close links between the story of Tay Thi and the behavior of the prostitute in Girl on the River suggest the film offers an even deeper challenge to the larger symbolic meanings the state accorded to prostitution. Its approving depiction of the prostitute's contribution to the war effort joins it to a sustained indigenous debate that began during the period of French colonial rule over the efficacy of collaboration in which the prostitute came to be seen as a metaphor for an acceptance of foreign rule. At the center of these debates were often-conflicting interpretations of Nguyen Du's nineteenth-century epic poem The Tale of Kieu (Truyen Kieu), in which the heroine's willingness to prostitute herself for her family was widely seen as an apologia for the author's decision to abandon the Le cause and serve the new Nguyen dynasty. In what are commonly known as the “writing brush wars” of the 1860s in the wake of the French conquest of the South, one leading collaborator with the French justified his decision by comparing his plight to that of Kieu. Similarly, Pham Quynh, a leading indigenous supporter of French rule in the 1920s, sought to canonize Kieu as a filial, self-sacrificing daughter who prostitutes herself to save her family in an effort to defend his own collaboration with the French. If collaboration for Pham Quynh was like prostitution, then he, like Kieu, was practicing it for the purest and noblest of motives, prostituting himself for the ultimate good of the nation.^[20]

These defenses of Kieu and of collaboration met with sharp indigenous attacks. Opponents of collaboration in the writing brush wars did not so much direct their ire at Kieu as argue that collaborators attempted to cloak their disloyalty in the false guise of filial piety. But Pham Quynh's detractors, some of whom came to play leading roles in the North Vietnamese state after 1945, chose to attack him through a critique of Kieu. Their argument that Kieu was little more than an unchaste and lewd woman undeserving of veneration was squarely aimed at undermining Pham Quynh's defense of collaboration. These proponents of “art for humanity's sake” in the 1930s, who set many of the parameters for the state's socialist realist aesthetics in the coming decades, had little use for Kieu and prostitution. Far from a model of revolutionary voluntarism, she appeared as little more than a weak, passive victim of an iniquitous social system that the socialist revolution aimed to transform.^[21] For instance, in To Huu's poem “The Song on the Perfume River” (1938), a work later celebrated by the North Vietnamese state,

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the reprobate prostitute who “drifts on streams of foul desire” is offered as a metaphor for the immorality of life under French colonialism. Only with the coming of socialist revolution, the poem suggests, will she “quit this wandering life of woe” and the “dirt and filth … vanish … to hail a new dawn.”^[22] The sympathetic portrayal of the prostitute as patriot in Girl on the River, which recalls Nguyen Du and Pham Quynh's use of the prostitute to defend collaboration, reverses the symbolic meanings the state gave to prostitution: it is the prostitute who is the wartime hero, only to be victimized by the ills of postwar socialist society.

Dang Nhat Minh's choice of two women to serve not only as the film's central characters but also as its narrative voice joins the film to a traditional literary idiom in which male authors adopted a female narrative voice that could serve counterhegemonic purposes without interference from the state. In part, his choice may have been a device to evade censorship by employing the practices of the northern radical and progressive authors of the 1920s and 1930s who used the coded language of gender to undertake political debate and avoid colonial censorship.^[23] The timing of the film's release in 1987, in the very early days of the reform movement, suggests that Minh would have needed to be very cautious in presenting his critiques because the boundaries and implications of the reforms remained uncertain.

Girl on the River employs two gendered literary tropes—women as victims and women as powerless—that give it the freedom to articulate a more sweeping indictment of contemporary society. Drawing on the symbolic resonance of women as victims, an idea that is enshrined in Vietnamese literary classics like the eighteenth-century epic poem Lament of the Soldier's Wife (Chinh Phu ngam), as well as in the literature of the 1920s and 1930s that portrayed a feminized colonial population victimized by Confucian family structures and the colonial state, the film uses the prostitute and female journalist to suggest society at large has been victimized by the state's inability to uphold its commemorative ideals. Similarly, and more bleakly, the film appropriates the common literary and cultural equation that linked women with powerlessness to suggest that just as the women in the film are unable to control their own fates, contemporary Vietnamese society lacks the agency to rescue itself from the state's betrayal of the socialist ideals that underlay its official narrative of war.

The final plot twist in Girl on the River underscores this subtle critique of state practices, starkly revealing the emptiness of the state's commemorative promises. After the argument with her husband, the

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woman journalist, now concerned with how the story of the prostitute might adversely affect her own family's status, finds the young woman and tells her she had been mistaken all along. The man she saw in the car, the journalist claims, was not the cadre she had helped. He had died, she says, many years before. Believing the journalist's lie, the young woman recalls her dream after she had helped the cadre escape in which he walked onto a battlefield to become a hero. But in the ironically elegiac vision that closes the film, she wrongly imagines he is killed in a glorious, self-sacrificing soldier's death.

WHAT ARE THE REAL LEGACIES OF THE WAR?

The importance the revisionist films of the 1980s attached to the be-trayals of the official meanings of wartime sacrifice reflected a more fundamental unease with the nature of postwar society in northern Vietnam. If revisionist filmmakers took full advantage of the opportunities the Renovation agenda offered to enlarge the parameters of public discourse on the legacies of war, they were far from champions of the market reforms adopted by the state in the mid-1980s to arrest the stag-nation of the Vietnamese economy.^[24] In almost all their films, the for-getfulness of many of their protagonists serves to emphasize the spiritual malaise they ascribe to contemporary society, in which the wartime virtues of revolutionary self-sacrifice are increasingly disregarded by corrupt and self-seeking cadres. The quest for individual advancement and rising economic inequalities, the revisionist films suggest, belie official promises that the sacrifices of war would bring collective egalitarianism and social justice in the postwar era.

Le Duc Tien's 1986 film, A Quiet Little Town (Thi Tran Yen Tinh), advances this critique through gentle but trenchant satire. On the way to the wedding of a relative, a highranking government minister from Hanoi and his driver are seriously injured in a traffic accident near a small provincial town. A local party official, whose nephew's wedding the minister was coming to attend, orders the better dressed of the two injured men to be sent to his town's clinic while the other man is taken to a neighboring town for treatment. After the local notables realize that their patient may die without surgery, the central question of the narrative becomes how the handling of the minister's case can best promote the fortunes of various members of the small town's party and state bureaucracy. The local party official, aware of the possible rewards that could come from saving a minister's life, urges that he be operated on

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immediately. The wife of the young doctor who would perform the surgery urges her reluctant husband to take up the challenge in the hopes that the grateful minister would organize the doctor's transfer to Hanoi and provide her a way out of the provincial town she detests. The head of the town clinic, believing the minister's condition is too serious for treatment in his clinic and that the minister's death could have serious repercussions for his own position, insists that he be returned to Hanoi for surgery.

In the meantime, back in Hanoi the minister's wife, whose manner and physical presence closely resemble those of Imelda Marcos, browbeats her sons to use their connections in the military to get a military jet to airlift her husband out. Eventually the young doctor takes charge and performs the surgery while the local party cadre organizes a welcoming party, made up of family and friends who had assembled for the aborted wedding of his nephew, to greet the minister's wife and family who are flying by military helicopter to the small town. They arrive just as the patient is wheeled out of surgery. As the doctor proudly pronounces the surgery a success, the minister's wife looks at the patient on the stretcher and realizes it is not her husband but his driver. Suddenly an announcement from the neighboring town reports that the minister's surgery in its clinic was successful and that he is resting comfortably. His wife and family rush off, dashing the hopes of local officials and bureaucrats that the minister's gratitude would advance their careers.

The preoccupation with status and power among agents of the state that infuses the damning portrait of society under the market economic reforms in A Quiet Little Town also emerges in the documentary How to Behave. The film, whose depiction of the lives of veterans in postwar society was discussed earlier, is centered around a group of filmmakers who honor the request of a dying colleague to discover if kindness (tu te), a term the film tellingly defines as “acting in the public rather than individual interest,” could still be found in Vietnamese society. The filmmakers ultimately do find kindness, not among party cadres or state bureaucrats—one of whom claims “No one has time for such outmoded notions these days” —but in a leper colony run by Catholic nuns, a particularly charged choice given the intense and sustained hostility of the socialist state in Vietnam toward the Catholic Church. If the devotion of the nuns to the lepers, as the film claims, rests on “faith,” How to Behave suggests the callousness of society at large represents a loss of faith in the state's socialist ideals. Pointedly noting that “the people”

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(nhan dan) are “sacred words” in the state's vocabulary as the objects of “sacrifice, devotion and generosity,” the film sets the difficult lives of ordinary people against the indifference of powerful party officials whose own lives are marked by material ease to suggest “the gap between words and deeds has become too wide.” The mixed tone of sorrow and anger through which the film articulates its sense of the postwar betrayal of wartime ideals emerges most sharply in the closing frames. A quotation appears on screen— “Only animals can turn from the suffering of men and busy themselves preening their furs and feathers” — to which the film's narrator adds, “This quote is not by my friend but by the venerated Karl Marx.”

If wartime experiences are a somewhat muted presence in the narratives of A Quiet Little Town and How to Behave, ^[25] a gendered construction of war memories serves as a crucial symbolic vehicle for the critique of contemporary society advanced by many of the revisionist films. They pit a series of grasping younger women against the probity of veterans whose virtuous behavior underlines the dominant ethos of corruption and selfishness the films ascribe to contemporary society. This metaphorical dichotomy builds in part upon the traditional Vietnamese division of gender roles that contrasts women as “generals of the interior” (noi tuong), who dominate the domestic sphere and oversee the family's budget, with men who properly inhabit the public realm, where they conduct the more contemplative official business of family life and governance. By rendering the contours of contemporary society as a feminine landscape forgetful of the self-sacrifices of war, the symbolic vocabularies of these films suggest that the power of the market economy has dangerously extended the private domain of women into the masculine public sphere and dislodged the traditional forces of moral order and authority in society.

The oppositional pairing of the behavior of younger women and soldiers to advance this gendered representation of the abandonment of wartime ideals occurs in the majority of revisionist films. In When the Tenth Month Comes, the actions of a female cadre whose preoccupation with material advancement prompts her to chastise the heroine Duyen for her “inability to get ahead” stand in sharp contrast to those of a soldier who had fought with Duyen's husband and eventually tells her son that his father is dead. When the son asks the soldier if he is telling the truth, his reply that “a soldier never lies” emphasizes the moral gulf between wartime revolutionary virtue and the ills of contemporary society. A decorated war veteran in How to Behave serves as an example

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of what the film calls “honest people who live a kind life” despite material deprivation, while a young woman becomes the chief symbol for its contention that kindness is largely absent in most contemporary social relations. Other films use one or the other of these paradigmatic figures. The statusseeking wife of the doctor in A Quiet Little Town who pushes her reluctant husband to operate does so in the hopes that it will bring his transfer to Hanoi and open up new opportunities for status and material comfort. The veteran father of the young girl in love with a soldier in A Fairy Tale for Seventeen-Year-Olds is a figure of particular depth whose blessing of his daughter's somewhat fanciful relationship suggests the ways in which masculine authority, cultivated by the experiences of war, provides a strong moral force in society.

In two films the engendered revisionist critique is rendered in a particularly sharp and disturbing manner. The contrast between the behavior of the veteran in Brothers and Relations and the wife of his brother in honoring the memory of her brother who was killed in war was noted at the outset of this chapter. Juxtaposing the selfless virtue of the veteran who collects and buries the remains of the fallen soldier with the obsession of the wife who works with unabashed eagerness to bribe and cajole an expansive network of corrupt officials to facilitate a potentially lucrative business trip to Singapore for her husband, the film suggests that the wife's singleminded pursuit of material advantage blinds her to her obligations to her dead brother. The wife's place in the film as a larger symbol of the perils of the marketplace emerges with particular force in a scene in which she meets her husband on the day of their wedding anniversary. She emerges from a shop carrying a boom box to greet her waiting husband, who has brought a small bouquet of flowers to mark the occasion. “You bought another cassette player?” he asks. “You can't have too many,” she jauntily replies. As the two ride off on their motorcycle, the wife clutches the boom box to her heart while carelessly holding the bouquet in her other hand. The flowers, a potent expression of the humane rather than material nature of social relationships, appear almost expendable; it is the boom box that gets the loving embrace.

In Nguyen Khac Loi's 1989 film, The General Retires (Tuong Ve Huu), a decorated general and the wife of his son serve as the central characters. The general, a figure of quiet authority and simple tastes who is clearly devoted to serving the ideals of the state, comes to live with his son's family after he retires from military service. But he soon feels out of place as he experiences the market-generated rhythms of life in the household. One day he discovers that his son's wife, a doctor at a

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maternity clinic, brings home aborted fetuses from the clinic to feed a pack of Alsatian dogs she is raising to sell as guard dogs to supplement the family's income. Appalled by her behavior and devastated to realize that the spiritual emptiness he finds in the household pervades contemporary society, the general leaves the house to rejoin his elderly military comrades, among whom he dies.^[26]

The symbolism of gender cuts even deeper in The General Retires and Brothers and Relations, which use the emasculation of husbands by their wives to reveal the corrupting seductiveness of the marketplace and its corrosive penetration into all realms of human relations. The son of the general is depicted as an impotent figure, powerless to resist the moral transgressions of the market that his wife has introduced into the house-hold. When the general tells his son what his wife has been doing, implicitly calling upon him to reassert his authority and end the practice, the son replies somewhat stiffly, as if to hide his embarrassment, “I had known about this but dismissed it as something of no importance.”

The brother of the veteran in Brothers and Relations is a similarly weak figure who is literally seduced into the conventions of the marketplace by his wife. In one key scene that illustrates the wife's domination (and that of the market), husband and wife are seen lounging on a bed after returning home with their new boom box. The wife removes her husband's glasses, unbuttons her shirt, and turns on a cassette of Western popular music. As she leans back seductively and pulls her husband toward her, he looks both at her and at the boom box next to her with an expression full of greed and licentiousness. The close of the film condemningly suggests that his emasculation and his embrace of the market economy are fully consummated. He sits mutely in the back of a car at the airport, his face filled with avaricious anticipation for his imminent business trip to Singapore, while his wife tells his brother that she does not have time to deal with the remains of her dead brother that he has recovered and brought to her.

Not all filmmakers shared the opprobrium with which these films greeted the coming of the market economy. For Luu Trong Ninh, the market economy offered a salutary alternative to what he perceived as the obvious failures of socialism. His 1993 film, Please Forgive Me (Xin Loi), depicts the trials of a soldier turned movie producer trying to make a film glorifying the North's war against the United States by using Vietnamese actors and actresses born after the Communist victory in 1975. The film focuses on the conflicting generational sensibilities of the producer and his cast. The producer, an austere figure proud of his role in

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“liberating” the country from foreign aggressors, criticizes his youthful cast for their ingratitude for his generation's self-sacrifice to state and society during the war. In response, the young cast members, with a notable absence of filial piety, impertinently ask what, beyond poverty, the older generation has really bequeathed to the country. Luu Trong Ninh's sympathies clearly lie with the younger generation. Almost twenty years younger than the directors of most of the revisionist films, he came of age not during the American War but in its aftermath. His film gives voice to an impatient and consumeroriented generation for whom official memories of wartime heroism hold no meaning, and the freedom to pursue individual interests permitted by the market economy is a welcome departure from what they see as the constraining collectivist ethos of socialist economics.^[27]

But if Please Forgive Me suggests the presence of generational differences among revisionist filmmakers over the meaning of war and its aftermath, the film is an exception to the largely conservative critique of contemporary society in most revisionist films. In depicting what they saw as the real legacies of war, these films did not so much subvert official memories of war as embrace a war of nostalgia. They offer remembrances of revolutionary morality, purity, and egalitarianism, all essential components of the state's wartime narrative, as a jeremiad against the materialism and spiritual declension of postwar society.

The frequently conservative cast of the revisionist critique of memory, commemoration, and legacies of war should not obscure the radical challenge these films posed to the public construction of historical memory in northern Vietnamese society. Official reaction to these films provides one indication of the boldness of their larger vision and the dangers it posed to state efforts to monopolize the meanings of war.^[28] A 1989survey undertaken by the People's Army Daily (Quan Doi Nhan Dan)asked technical cadres, political cadres, and senior colonels and generals for their reaction to the film The General Retires. Most technical cadres, whose lowerlevel positions had little connection to official ideology, liked the film. But some 60 percent of political cadres, colonels, and generals surveyed, whose positions linked their ideological outlook much more closely to that of the state, voiced strong disapproval.^[29] The revisionist films also encountered opposition in the Ministry of Culture, whose official censors requested a number of cuts, arguing, for instance, that the metaphysical setting through which the heroine of When the Tenth Month Comes meets her dead husband promoted improper beliefs in superstitious practices. In most cases, however, the artistic freedom

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granted under the reform agenda allowed filmmakers to ultimately resist these pressures.^[30]

Nor should the meanings these films gave to memories of war be viewed as an isolated phenomenon disconnected from broader popular discourse on the war in contemporary northern Vietnamese society. Along with filmmakers, a group of writers also drew inspiration from the relaxation of official supervision in the arts to write a series of bestselling novels and short stories that pursue and deepen many of the larger themes of the revisionist films. Their shared sensibilities emerge in the claims of the veteran narrator of Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War (Noi Buon Chien Tranh), one of the most popular of these works, after recounting his disillusionment over his wartime service: “The future lied to us, there long ago in the past. There is no new life, no new era nor hope for a beautiful future.”^[31]

These articulations of countermemories of war in film and literature also link the discourse surrounding war commemoration in Vietnam with broader global patterns of the contested processes of remembering war throughout the twentieth century. Just as the Vietnamese state's insistence that the fallen soldier served as the preeminent legitimating symbol for its wars against the French and the Americans mirrored the official memorializing aims and practices of interwar European states, the form and content of Vietnamese countermemories of war bear striking, if unconscious, parallels with the works of interwar European artists, filmmakers, poets, and novelists. Although separated by space, time, and culture, works such as Otto Dix's Der Krieg, Wilfred Owen's “Anthem for a Doomed Youth,” Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, or Abel Gance's J'accuse and the challenges they posed to the official meaning of World War I find resonant company in revisionist Vietnamese film.^[32]

What joins these works most fully is a common insistence that the ideological base of state constructions of war conceals more than it reveals. Like their European counterparts, the Vietnamese revisionist films of the 1980s—whether reasserting the power of traditional familial claims on the memories of fallen soldiers, recasting official memory to subvert state commemorative practices, or appropriating the ideals of the official memorializing project to voice displeasure with the legacies of war—opened up the process of remembering war, acknowledging and articulating the multiplicity of meanings that the wars against the French and Americans, which claimed the lives of more than three million of their people, hold for northern Vietnamese society.

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NOTES