Diasporic Returns and the Making of Vietnamese American Ghost Films in Vietnam Lan Duong University of California, Riverside

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Access provided by University of California @ Riverside (12 Nov 2016 22:09 GMT) Diasporic Returns and the Making of Vietnamese American Ghost Films in Vietnam Lan Duong University of California, Riverside

Since the end of the Vietnam War, it has been a cliche´ for writers, politicians, and journalists in the United States to speak about the “ghosts of war” as an enduring metaphor for the effects that the war has on the minds and bodies of Americans. “Vietnam” still casts a pall over today’s political discourses about war, refugees, and US foreign policy. For scholars in Vietnam studies, the “ghosts of war” appear in research about the social relations between the living and the dead in the post-war era; anthropologists, for example, have analyzed the ways that ghosts exert a symbolic and material influence on those grappling with the terrific changes the country has undergone through the ghosting of narratives.1 Unlike this body of work, which considers the impact of ghosts on lived realities, I am interested in the ways that ghosts have come to life in the form of film, most specifically in the movies directed by Vietnamese Americans who work in Vietnam. Such highly commercial films and their modes of production provide a compelling trace of diasporic history, one borne out of war and displacement, within narratives of the nation. To look at ghost films is to touch on “ghostly matters” indeed,2 for the genre in Vietnamese film history is ghostly itself, barely registering as a genre because of a Communist ban on superstition since the founding of the Republic of North Vietnam in 1945. Thereafter, as Heonik Kwon writes,

the postcolonial states of Vietnam have made enormous administrative and political efforts to battle against traditional religious beliefs and ritual customs; first in the northern half of the country by the revolutionary communist state after the August Revolution of 1945 and particularly after the 1946-54 Independence War against France, and then across the regions after the reunification of the country in 1975. (11) When North Vietnam established itself as a Communist and secular state, it deemed superstitious beliefs, or meˆ tıń didÀoa: n, backwards and morally deficient; bans on spiritual practices in the latter half of the twentieth century have made it

...... ß MELUS: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]. DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlw029

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taboo to deal with the supernatural in film. As a result, not many ghost films exist in the country’s film archives, constituting an evocative absence within the space of the national archive.3 But contemporary films of this genre are further framed by a haunting of history; they incorporate the work and finances of those who were cast outside the national family after the war ended in 1975. While before the end of the war, Vietnamese refugees were denounced as traitors to the national family—and thus viewed as symbolically dead by the state—the diaspora, specifically those who are or born of Vietnamese refugees, are revenants of an interesting and important kind; they return as investors, tourists, artists, and filmmakers. The state increasingly incorporates and ingests their labor and talent as part of its efforts to promote Vietnamese culture in a global frame. The film Ngoî Nha` Trong Heœm (House in the Alley) (2013) exemplifies this dynamic. Directed by Vietnamese American filmmaker Leˆ Va˘n Kiê: t, the film takes place in a haunted house in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) and show- cases the specter of a host of problematic relations between husband and wife, worker and employer. As signaled by the tropes of labor framing the film, House engages with questions of displacement and diasporic capital at the level of the textual and extratextual. My reading of the film centralizes the figures of the dispossessed that operate vis-a`-vis the female character and as they are found in the film’s production. At the film’s heart is a middle-class wife who miscarries her child and discovers that a legion of orphan ghosts has taken over her house. Embodying abjection and terror when possessed by these ghosts, she serves as an expression for the grief of the stillborn and those rendered invisible by the state’s project of rapid urban development: the country’s dispossessed are those generations that have succeeded the war and who now live through Vietnam’s globalizing present. The dispossessed, however, also alludes to the diaspora in the film’s context. While House deals with historically suppressed subjects such as ghosts and the supernatural within the country’s national culture, the film’s making bespeaks the prominent roles that diasporans now play in the nation’s afterlife. The motif of the haunted house and the eerie disturbances that trouble its residents resonate with the modes by which the state seeks to manage and incorporate diasporic difference within the house that is the nation-state. Forty years after the formation of the diaspora, diasporic returns have come back in the form of actual and cultural capital to rejuvenate an almost moribund film industry in the country. Understood through this optic, the film is symptomatic of a Derridean trace, indicating the extent to which the occulted Other is present in the sign and reveals itself to be an absent presence.4 Absent is the presence of the diaspora in state narratives and the forces by which the diaspora has been vital to the nation-state and its development. While the state tries to efface the history of those originating from South Vietnam and, more specifically, of refugees who fled the Communist regime post-1975, cultural production in the country is now redolent with capital,

154 Diasporic Returns ideas, and talent arising from the diaspora. House allows us to chart the cultural genealogy of the genre in Vietnamese cinema and highlights how narratives of diasporic return are shadowed by history and capital. The analysis that follows activates the occulted presence in the ﬁlm to show that what remains ghostly in the articulations of a globalized Vietnamese nationhood are the vestiges of a diasporic history.

The Vietnamese Film Industry: Revolution and Renovation In 1975, Vietnam plunged into a decade of extreme poverty, exacerbated by the exodus of thousands of Vietnamese and ethnic Chinese, border wars with Cambodia and China, and the US trade embargo. As a response to these crises, the Fifth Party Congress implemented a historic roster of economic reforms called D- œôi Mo’i, or Renovation. These reforms introduced Vietnam to a system of socialist capitalism, or capitalism with a socialist orientation, designed to slowly open the country to the free market while still upholding the socialist values on which it was founded. Since D- œôi Mo’i, the country has become more of an economic force within the Southeast Asian region than a socialist stronghold. An index of the country’s global presence is found in its membership in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), beginning in 1995 and 2007, respectively. Most recently, the United States signed the Transpacific Partnership with Vietnam and other countries, a historic treaty that allows US corporations unprecedented access to Vietnamese labor and markets. While Vietnam’s economy has been revitalized in the last two decades, the sociopolitical issues afflicting Vietnamese society are multiple; the gap between the rich and poor is ever widening, land ownership disputes bedevil relations between ethnic minorities and the government, and the state continues to crack down on political dissent and religious freedom. On the cultural front, D- œôi Mo’i has created the conditions for the Vietnamese film and publishing industries to develop, allowing for greater cultural exchange between Vietnam and other countries. Vietnam’s foreign policies permit diasporic artists to return to the homeland and work with the government to produce their work. Once denounced as “traitors” for having left the homeland, Vietnamese diasporans are now an “integral part of the nation” (Collet and Furuya 56). Recent immigration laws, which include the granting of five-year visas for Viet Kieu in 2007, foster the improved standing for this community. One year later, the state allows for dual citizenship, which ensures that the older and 1.5 generations of the diaspora become naturalized citizens in the country in which they were born. In line with these legislative acts, the development of diasporic films forms a crucial aspect of Vietnamese cinema today. Vietnamese American actors, directors, and producers return to the country in order to make a variety of

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commercially viable genre films customized for a Vietnamese market. This group of artists makes up a larger group of Vietnamese diasporic returnees known col- loquially as Viet Kieu, a term that is used by journalists and writers alike. As John Boudreau writes, “Viet Kieu are now involved with at least half of the commercial films made in Vietnam—a stunning development considering that not long ago those who returned faced deep suspicion from the Communist government as well as opposition from staunch anti-Communists in San Jose and Orange County.” Sociologists have called this phenomenon of travel, especially marked for Asian Americans in recent years, “return migration.” As Jane Yamashiro notes, depending on the country’s labor needs, the receiving Asian country often changes its laws to attract and accommodate more skilled workers. She writes: “[M]igration policies that establish special visas and residency statuses for ethnic return migrants provide opportunities not only for financial gain but also to con- nect or reconnect with homeland cultures, and familial and social networks” (21-22). In particular, Yamashiro discusses two types of migration patterns; “return migration” is the process by which first generation migrants return to the homeland, whereas “ethnic return migration” is the movement of later foreign nationals to their ancestral homelands. In the latter case, “the migrant may not speak the language or know the culture” when they return (22). Because of the rising phenomenon of “ethnic return migration” for the 1.5 and second generation of Vietnamese Americans, US journalists have understood this movement as one in which the youth are now returning to Vietnam in order to pursue— ironically—the “American Dream.”5 Reports such as these do not take into account the ways that transnational movements are conditioned by diasporic class privilege and influenced by state politics and policies, which target the diaspora directly. In 2004, the state promulgated Resolution No. 36, which posited that the overseas Vietnamese community is “an integral part of the nation” (qtd. in Collet and Furuya 56).6 In 2009, as Nga Pham writes, the state then facilitated a three-day convocation in Hanoi that “1,000 overseas Vietnamese attended; discussions centered on Vietnamese returnees and the need for them to help modernize the country.” The incentive to attract the Vietnamese diaspora to the homeland remains strong and cloaked in language that accents ties to the national family despite the state’s dismissal of refugee histories and memories. Writing on the commemorations of refugee camps, Ashley Carruthers and Boitran Huynh-Beattie point out that against a context of a South Vietnamese memory that is being “disappeared” by the state, the Vietnamese government has been actively “trying to woo the diaspora in the West to participate in a project of transnational nation-building” (149). The state’s gesture of inclusion towards the diaspora is perhaps best understood in economic terms, underscored by the fact that remittances to Vietnam total in the billions. At last estimate, the Vietnamese diaspora sent eleven billion dollars to Vietnam in 2013 (“Remittances”). The annual incomes of those living

156 Diasporic Returns abroad also represent a tremendous amount of money that can be tapped. As Ivan V. Small notes, “The emotionally laden notion of homeland ‘return’ is strategi- cally deployed and economically calculated by the state, resulting in varying degrees of embodiment of the ‘overseas Vietnamese’ identity” (237). Small argues for an understanding of the ways in which the government constructs embodied subjectivities, particularly through the language of nostalgia for those who return. For the state, returnees are economic “bridges” between their country of perma- nent residence and the home country of Vietnam (238). Befitting this backdrop, Vietnamese American filmmakers make highly commercial films (phim th:i tru’o’ng) that cannot simply be characterized as exilic or nostalgic narratives.7 Box office receipts for commercial filmmaking by directors such as Victor Vu and Charlie Nguyen show the extraordinary rise of what Vietnamese film scholar Viet Van Tran describes as the work of Viet Kieu directors who have “master[ed] the most advanced techniques and are in touch with the latest trends of world cinema” (206). Changing the look and landscape of Vietnamese cinema, Vietnamese American filmmakers, some of whom have grown up in Los Angeles and Orange County, now travel back and forth to Saigon to make movies in and about Vietnam. Connections between southern California and southern Vietnam are crucial here because of the ways that networks of support have been established along these routes of return. As they travel to Vietnam with technical expertise and experience to make films, directors such as Ham Tran and Stephane Gauger also hail from a vibrant Vietnamese American popular culture industry that is unique to Orange County, California. From the directors’ viewpoint, making films in Vietnam makes most financial sense because the costs of producing films is cheaper, the market for Vietnamese- language film is greater (eighty million people in the country versus three million in the diaspora), and Vietnamese production companies such as Galaxy often pay directors to make low-cost films in the country. Actors such as Dustin Nguyen (of 21 Jump Street [1987-91] fame) and Johnny Tri Nguyen (a former stuntman in films such as Spider-Man [2002]) also have a better chance of achieving success in Vietnam than in the United States, where they are minoritized and shut out of the Hollywood film industry. In her schemata of different forms of transnational filmmaking, Mette Hjort delineates how this body of work can be categorized under the rubric of an “opportunistic transnational cinema,” in which “priority [is given] to economic issues to the point where monetary factors dictate the selection of part- ners beyond national borders” (19). As such, however, films by Vietnamese American filmmakers who work in Vietnam do not readily fit under the rubric of Asian/American directors, as the imperative to make films here is a combination of opportunity, nostalgia, and pragmatism and a form of transnational return that impacts how Asian Americans view Asia and how Asians look back at Asian America. Analyzing return narratives in Vietnamese American literature, Chih- ming Wang argues that understanding the larger geopolitical context is critical

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as the work of memory and movement “allow[s] us to capture the complex trans- Pacific politics that is reshaping the meaning of Asian United States today” (164). The movement of Vietnamese American filmmakers who return and whose filmmaking practices are further complicated by the fact of state control captures these trans-Pacific politics. Making films under the auspices of the Vietnamese state means that the directors’ aesthetics and themes are shaped by state censorship controls and the tactics of surveillance. Chris Dixon argues that the Vietnamese state operates in an authoritarian manner in this regard:

[S]ince the beginning of the reform period, the Vietnamese state has significantly softened. However, the retreat from authoritarianism has taken place unevenly; the state has retained very considerable power to clamp down, certainly in the short run. This is demonstrated in occasional, abrupt, often apparently arbitrary and sometimes extreme, manifestations of authoritarian rule. (25) Such actions serve as “reminders of the state’s power and as warnings to those engaged in non-sanctioned activities” (25). Vietnamese American filmmakers are not immune to this expression of power, being given some leeway in the depiction of violence, sex, and history even as they must avoid subjects that are taboo, such as the American war, re-education, Vietnamese refugees, South Vietnamese resentment, and anti-communist feeling.8 Even so, censorship controls in Vietnam have seen dramatic changes in the past ten years, a laxity found in the ways that certain genre films can be made, including a recent trend in Vietnamese filmmaking: the horror film (phim kinh d:i). While before these drastic changes few filmmakers could make ghost films in Vietnam because of a Communist ban on supernatural practices and lack of funding, now films explicitly deal with death, spirits, and the afterlife. Alongside this development is the phenomenon of transnational collaborations. An important film of this kind was the Korean-Vietnamese horror film Mu’o’i (Ten) (2007), directed by a Korean filmmaker and shot in central Vietnam and Korea. The film’s gory scenes promulgated a first-time ever ratings system in the country and was nonetheless a big success with Vietnamese audiences. Other films such as Khi Yeû D- u’ng Quay La: i (Don’t Look Back) (2010), directed by Vietnamese American director Nguy^~en-Vo˜ Minh-Nghieˆm, and Vietnamese films such as Gi~u’a Hai Thê Gio’i (Between Two Worlds) (2011), featuring Dustin Nguyen, have followed in this film’s wake. The use of the occult in film also aligns with the current official revival of spiritual practices in Vietnam, which have a long history of suppression, especially when the practitioners have been women (Norton 22). As Karen Fjelsted and Thi Hien Nguyen argue, however, with the economic and social reforms known as Renovation, the government has “loosened state controls on religious practice and reinserted Vietnam into the global market system. . . . Popular ritual practices, including many that had previously been viewed by the state as ‘social evils,’

158 Diasporic Returns are now flourishing in Vietnam” (7). Other scholars note that while the state has opened its doors to globalization, it also attempts to preserve its “national culture” against foreign influences by embracing the spiritual practices of many of its religious and ethnic Others that constitute Vietnam’s diverse population. Barley Norton observes that in the reform era, “the preservation and exaltation of culture (va˘n hoá) as a means of bolstering the ‘national identity’ (baœnsac daˆn to: c) has become a pervasive institutionalized mantra” (6). According to Alexander Woodside, the turn to “cultural neotraditionalism” becomes a way for the state to create an authentic, cultural bulwark against which the forces of globalization would be blunted and “is part of the renegotiation of authoritarianism in a postcollectivist era, not its abandonment” (71). The state’s ongoing celebration of diversity and multiculturalism dovetails well with its interests in reviving spiritual traditions as a way to attract both domestic and international tourism today. On the question of spirits and the state, post-war Vietnam embodies what Pheng Cheah calls “spectral nationality,” in which the postcolonial state lives on the lifeblood of past revolutionary ideals, possessing the people that toil under it as its host body. Interrogating the dynamic between the state and the people, life and death, Cheah writes: “The state is an uncontrollable specter that the nation-people must welcome within itself, and direct, at once for itself and against itself, because this specter can possess the nation-people and bend it toward global capitalist interests” (247). Cheah explores the ontology of nationalism to argue that nationalist ideology is itself a haunting. Nationalism after decoloniza- tion, he argues, invades the living body of the people and transforms the people into ideological prostheses for the nation. In response, the people must house this phantom invasion at the same time that they must also try to resist it. Such is the paradox for those who belong to the nation and who try to effect some power over their state of belonging. In the present moment, the Vietnamese state “lives on” (or, to use Cheah’s word, sur-vie) through its management of the past, ideology, capital, and everyday life. Cheah’s formulations are useful in analyzing the conditions of production for the movie House in the Alley. House shows how state nationalism “lives on” via diasporic filmmaking and the regulatory measures it undergoes to find life on the screen. Imprinted in its modes of production, the film animates the paradox of national belonging; it conjures the dead and brings to the surface a repressed past that figures the diaspora as former inhabitants of a past nation. In its deployment of diasporic capital, House tests the limits of what it means for the diasporic subject to belong to and labor for a spectral nation. Through this film and others, I make a case for how the ligaments between the national and transnational constitute the ways in which ghost films are produced in Vietnam by several Vietnamese American filmmakers, dubbed the “Viet Film Wave” by California newspapers.9

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Revenants and Returns: A House in the Alley in South Vietnam “Viet Film Wave” directors, some of whose families comprised the waves of refugees coming from South Vietnam after the war ended in 1975, hail from southern California and are working in Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City, today. Their work is structured by a political economy of filmmaking that favors the production of films in Vietnam because of the country’s cheap costs of labor. It is also informed by media networks that help to leverage their standing in Vietnam as directors who have brought (home) their technical expertise to the film industry. Their turn as well-known directors at home and abroad pivots on their multiple returns to Vietnam. Recently, the Vietnamese state has recognized the potential of diasporic returns and encouraged migrations back to the homeland with key pieces of leg- islation concerning cinema and citizenship. Exemplary of this trajectory has been the work of transnational Vietnamese American director Leˆ Va˘n Kiê: t, who has made two films about Vietnamese Americans in Orange County: Dust of Life (2006) and Sad Fish (2009). Since 2009, he has turned to making horror films in Vietnam for a mostly Vietnamese audience, including House in the Alley and Bœây Câ: p3(Trap Level 3)(2013),which was banned before it was released in Vietnam because of its gratuitous sex and violence. House was screened in the metropolitan areas of Saigon and Hanoi in March 2012 and was then distributed throughout other regions of the country (D. Tran, “Hello”). It was also shown at the Vietnamese International Film Festival (now Viet Film Fest) in Orange County in 2013. Such are the routes of distribution and exhibition through which many Vietnamese American-directed films now circulate. The film’s mode of travel also points to the nodes of a robust popular culture that circulate between “Little Saigons” of the diaspora and “Big Saigon” (Carruthers 68). On 30 April 1975, the Vietnam War ended with the Communist takeover of Saigon, the capital city in South Vietnam. The “reunification” of the country included brutal reeducation camps for former South Vietnamese soldiers and sex workers, the repossession of property and land in the region, and the forced migration of many urbanites to the countryside to New Economic Zones (NEZs) in the country’s surge toward a centrally planned economy. In the decades following the “fall” of Saigon,10 countless southern Vietnamese, many of whom were former US allies, fled in successive waves to countries such as the United States, France, and Australia, forming the Vietnamese diaspora. In the United States, California has become the state in which large numbers of Vietnamese refugees and immigrants have resettled. Now home to the largest Vietnamese population outside of Vietnam, California is also the “birthplace” of a particular cultural empire: the Vietnamese American variety show. Originating more than three decades ago, variety shows

160 Diasporic Returns such as Paris by Night, Asia, and Vaˆn So’n are part of a major cultural industry produced by and for the Vietnamese diaspora.11 The connective tissues between Vietnamese American subcultures and the culture of filmmaking in Vietnam provide an entreé into the examination of House’s textual and extratextual address. The film’s use of spectacle is derived from Vietnamese American cultural shows such as Paris by Night, but even more con- cretely, many directors bring their media connections with these variety shows (and their proximity to Hollywood) to Vietnam as they work within a tight net- work of writers, actors, editors, and producers that hail from similar backgrounds. The film’s casting of diasporic singer/actor/model Ngoˆ Thanh Vaˆn, whose family moved to Norway when she was ten and who has since returned to Vietnam to pursue an acting career, only secures the linkages between the diasporic entertain- ment industry and contemporary Vietnamese cinema. The spectacularization of Ngoˆ’s body in House is also similar to how the female body in the variety show performs as a spectacle. In the film, however, the female body is overtly sexualized (at one point she dances nude in the rain) and yet highly abject, performing mostly as a vessel for the angry spirits that inhabit it. The film establishes the duality of female abjection and the objectification of the female body from the beginning. Having moved into a house in the alley, Tha`nh (Trân Baœo So’n) and Thaœo (Ngoˆ Thanh Vaˆn) are newlyweds and expecting a child. Marked by dramatic lighting and canted angles, the first scenes of the film are meant to be horrific: during a violent thunderstorm, Thaœo undergoes labor and miscarries the baby. This bloody introduction emphasizes how her miscar- riage is the kernel of a trauma that will haunt the would-be mother throughout the film. Soon after, amid the clutter of their new home, she tries to cope with her baby’s death. Haunted by this loss, Thaœo keeps the corpse in the couple’s bed- room and is later possessed by the vengeful ghosts residing in the home. In Lucy Fischer’s words, the film traffics in fears coalescing around motherhood and “birth traumas,” signaling the ways that horror films seek to foreground women’s experience but also “appropriat[e] the quotidian” (425). To be sure, the horrifying figure of the unborn child is found in many US films and trades on the promise and dread for the future that children represent.12 But such fears about the unborn are also entrenched in Southeast Asian religious and supernatural beliefs around notions of karma and animism. Analyzing the block- buster Thai film Nang Nak (1999), Adam Knee explains that local folklore beliefs articulate a fear in the “ghost of a woman [who] has died during childbirth” (141). Resulting from a violent death, this kind of ghost is called a pii dtai tang krom and can be doubly horrifying because the act of birthing has led to the deaths of both mother and child. As Panivong Norindr underscores in his study of the Lao horror film Chantaly (2013), the predominance of beliefs in spirits (or phi) for Laotians provides a framework of living for the living; they “affect the way people relate to nature, understand illness and misfortune, and shapes interpersonal

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relationships” (36). In both cases, as Knee and Norindr separately note, woman’s reproductive labor can be a source of dread and inspiration. In House, however, labor contains an added charge since Tha`nh struggles with labor problems at his company. The specters haunting postsocialist Vietnam are the workers whose value as laborers has been resignified in the country’s move to globalize the economy in recent years. As faceless laborers, they nonetheless represent a narrative force, revolting and staging a strike at Tha`nh’s factory and menacing the familial space with the threat of chaos and disruption. Throughout House, Tha`nh is, in fact, torn between his wife and his job: while tending to his sick wife, he must also deal with his ailing company. Ultimately, he falls short in maintaining order in the private (home) or public (workplace) sphere, even as his subordinate, Minh, attempts to explain to him that these spaces necessarily bleed into one another. Tha`nh’s mother evinces the same point of view but renders this pronouncement more ominously; she exhorts him to govern with power, keeping both his wife and his workers under control and imply- ing that if either goes unchecked, Tha`nh’s masculinity is at stake. If the film thematizes patriarchy’s failure (and women’s complicity in it) to manage the household in a time when Vietnam embraces global capitalism, it also reveals how postsocialist modernity has a grave problem with memory, which presents a thornier issue. The upwardly mobile couple is stricken with not only grief but also social amnesia; they are unaware of the deaths of children that have occurred in their home before they moved into it. Tensions are heightened further when the audience learns that the film’s setting—the titular house in the alley— was the site of an orphanage where young children were killed in a tragic fire years ago. The couple finds themselves, therefore, among the undead against a volatile context of labor unrest and rapid urbanization. Tha`nh and Thaœo are pun- ished for neither knowing their home’s history nor reconciling with its past life before they work to reconstruct it. House cites Vietnam’s traumatic past and its mode of globalization as the root of the problem. It poses the question of why contemporary Saigon may be the place for the unhousing of restless spirits. As the country’s center for capitalistic development today, the city may be hailed by another name (Ho Chi Minh City), but as the film’s setting, Saigon also obliquely refers to an unseemly past of dec- adence and corruption prior to the state’s forced economic and political rehabil- itation.13 An intermingling of different temporalities thus inhabits the cityscape. Erik Harms makes this point but in another context; he discusses the city’s recent plans for urbanization, including a large complex of housing in one of its major districts. This project has created a certain sense of restlessness among some of its inhabitants as 14,600 working-class residents must grapple with eventually being evicted from their homes; they experience a ruptured sense of temporality as a result (345). As Harms explains, these forced evacuations gesture toward a

162 Diasporic Returns complex architecture of past dislocations and present disruptions for the displaced. He describes this population:

Residents already displaced and those soon-to-be displaced include recent migrants with tenuous land rights, multigenerational families whose ancestors have lived in the area since before the French colonial era, residents from before 1975 whose land papers still bear the stamps of the old “Saigon regime” and former revolutionary soldiers and “heroic mothers” whose homes are decorated with certificates cele- brating their valor in the war against the Americans. (345) Along similar lines, anthropologist Christina Schwenkel elaborates on the feeling of discontent and disaffection so pervasive in a time in which “state support has withered and forced evictions have increased” (257). The disenchantment with and the desires for state care and belonging are what she refers to as “postsocialist affect,” which names the apprehension and uncertainty experienced by those whose homes are targeted by investors for “renewal” (257). House manifests these affects as anxieties in the film’s evocation of the loss of “socialist care” for those left behind in modernity’s project. A liminal space (as most haunted houses are in ghost films), the “house in the alley” refers at once to the ruins of Vietnam’s col- lectivization program and present-day project of urbanization, which aims to reconstruct space with rapidity and without regard for time, place, and history. As the film details, managing a house after a time of socialist housing is an especially estranging enterprise for women. Without family or friends in the city, Thaœo becomes the most receptive body for the dead to occupy. From the start, Thaœo not only mourns the death of a child but also the absence of familial and communal ties in the urban space. Residing in the city further compounds her discontentment and loneliness, emphasized in a scene that features her and a longtime girlfriend talking at cross-purposes with one another against the cold blue angles of the cityscape. As a mirror to this setting, the “house in the alley,” with its color palette of blues and greens, symbolizes the downside of globalization for the female subject of modernity. Gendered forms of alterity in the film only exacerbate the haunting. Because she is someone who joins the patrilineal family in the city, Thaœo stands outside of this family. (In Vietnamese this position of liminality is linguistically signified; the mother’s side of the family is called ngoa: i, or outside, whereas the paternal family is nô: i, or inside.) She does not belong to any community in the film, and neither does her mother-in-law welcome her into the space of the patriarchal family. That Thaœo is not able to produce a (male) heir to the family only aggravates the tenuous position she holds in it. Studying selective reproduction through the “haunting images” of sonography, Tine Gammeltoft argues that daughters-in- law feel a particular sense of burden in coming into the husband’s family because “their belonging [is] contingent on their ability to live up to social expectations.” In a context in which Confucian values of patrilineage are predominant, for

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women, “childbearing [becomes] a critical moral test.” As Gammeltoft powerfully contends, not bearing a child commits a grave offense against the family qua nation. She writes that in Vietnam, “a complete child body affirms the capacities of parents (particularly mothers) for practical care, while also attesting to their moral integrity in a cosmological sense, indicating that they and their ancestors have lived in proper ways” (233). Proper womanhood, as Gammeltoft finds, roots itself in bearing a healthy, able-bodied child, a future laborer that would live up to its working potential in a globalizing Vietnam. While House conjures conventional images of female reproduction and abjection often found in Asian horror films, the themes of the film converge with a great degree of specificity and emphasis. It is important that present-day Saigon constitutes the setting for the film, which deals with the specter of capitalism in a postsocialist era. Using the city as the burial ground for dead children, the film raises the issue of history in questioning the sacrifices that have been made for the sake of Vietnam’s economy. As much as it deals with property, the film also ruminates on gendered notions of propriety for those subjects who are located inside (nô: i) and outside (ngoa: i) the national family, for whom the reproduction of ideology and its citizenry—the “heroic mother” of nationalist lore—is rooted in the figure of the woman, a mother who sacrifices multiple sons to fight for the country. As Hue-Tam Ho Tai notes of the recent commemorations of this figure in Vietnam, “focusing on the extraordinary losses suffered by the Heroic Mothers could—and occasionally did—lead to a questioning of the human costs of war” (180). House registers a similar ambivalence; the film features the female protagonist as an alien subject of Vietnamese nationalist modernity. She can neither reproduce the ideology of capital nor bear children properly, and yet, she remains a portal through which the dead, or the undesirable under- class of Vietnamese society, express their discontents. Without narrative resolution, the film offers a spectral portrait of the national family, one in which the wife is neither living nor dead, and the stillborn child, unbeknownst to the father, resides with them even as the couple moves out of the house in the alley.

The Afterlife of the Nation and its Diaspora Remarking on Vietnamese modernity and the question of neoliberalism, Li Zhang argues that for countries such as China and Vietnam, a “flexible postsocialism” appears to be in place, “one marked by selective incorporation of such neoliberal strategies as the devolution of state power, governing from afar, self-governing, and optimization in diverse domains beyond the marketplace” (661). Of the term postsocialism, Zhang makes clear that it is not fixed as a mode of periodization whereby the prefix post- signifies a time period after socialism. Rather, she uses “this term to refer to conditions of transformation and articulation of socialist and nonsocialist practices and logics regardless of the official labeling of the state.” As

164 Diasporic Returns she states, such “flexible assemblages with their own characteristics have not diminished but rather strengthened the authoritarian rule of the party-state” (661). Zhang’s formulation of flexible postsocialism aligns with the Vietnamese state’s renovated strategies of inclusion toward its diaspora. In its making, House in the Alley signals and critiques the modes of “socialism from afar” that Zhang states are particular to Vietnam; the film deals with a formerly repressed subject in national culture and is produced by the children of the country’s former Others. Seeing ghosts as figures of critique is in keeping with Bliss Cua Lim’s res- onant work on temporality in ghost films. She suggests that “ghost narratives productively explore the dissonance between modernity’s disenchanted time and the spectral temporality of haunting in which the presumed boundaries between past, present, and future are shown to be shockingly permeable” (288). Lim argues for an understanding of ghosts that asserts a “radicalized accountability to those who are no longer with us, a solidarity with specters made possible by remembering” (319). Scholars in Vietnamese American studies similarly contend that the ghost serves as a critical force in narratives of progress and telos. “Ghosts of war” in this context of writing and criticism signify a past and a present that must be con- tinually apprehended and mourned. In the fiction of Vietnamese diasporic writers, as Thu-Hu’o’ng Nguy^~en-Vo˜ argues, mourning is an ever-present task for the living. She states that loss is rewritten in terms of an “interrupted history of the South, the death of its nation” (6). The nation’s promise and its demise remains a source of melancholia in a literature that mourns the loss of the former South, which has been dispossessed of its “promise of colonial sovereignty and thus the loss of the life force itself” (10). Analyzing minority literature on the Vietnam War, Viet Thanh Nguyen observes that much “of the writing, art, and politics of Vietnamese refugees, is about the problem of mourning the dead, remembering the missing, and considering the place of the survivors in the movement of history” (8). Given these acts of commemoration in the rewriting of stories as history, Yên Leˆ Espiritu further posits that scholars must become storytellers of ghosts themselves in order to “pay attention to what modern history has rendered ghostly and to write into being the settling presence of the things that appear to be not there” (xix). For her, ghostly retellings are part of a critical and ethical effort “to remember the lost and missing subjects of history” (xx). Creating ghost films in contemporary Vietnam, Vietnamese American directors draw on a highly commercial genre, one that productively opens a space for the exploration of the themes of the repressed once considered taboo in Vietnamese culture. Reading ghost films as a “critical effort to remember the lost and missing” (Espiritu xx) may also be a generative and productive gesture. For what the making of ghost films in Vietnam reveals is the postsocialist context from which they are produced; this body of work shows the present-day cultural

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seams of a state that tries to govern neoliberally. While allowing for more films of different genres to be produced and distributed, the state continues to restrict subject matter. Portrayals of the war, re-education camps, and the plight of refugees are still subject to censorship. Against such strictures, films such as House in the Alley are part of the reim- agining of the nation’s afterlife in which diasporic returns are essential to the country’s filmmaking infrastructure. These returns point to Vietnam’s mode of spectral nationalism, or the process by which the Other is at once inhibited and ingested by the state. At the same time that the Vietnamese state tries to efface the presence of a diasporic past in official narratives, it also embraces diasporic capital in the contemporary era. While the state legislates the production of diasporic culture and movement of diasporic subjects in the country’s borders, it also seeks to cannibalize diasporic cultural production, in effect living on the labor of those whose families were cast out of the nation in the post-1975 era. By the same token, the spectral also makes visible the lingering presence of the South Vietnamese who return to demand a role in the cultural and economic life of the nation today. In its making and content, House in the Alley invokes the notion of diasporic returns to underline what is both absent and present in the ways the nation-state manages its cultural identity and borders under globalization. Through the process of spectral nationalism, the trace of the diaspora manifests itself in the making of a (trans)national Vietnamese culture today.

Notes 1. For Mai Lan Gustafsson, Vietnam’s undead is a rich site of inquiry. “Postwar Vietnam,” she argues, “is a house that has suffered a death in the family and the dead have returned” (57). Ann Marie Leshkowich analyzes the trope of wandering ghosts in everyday discourse among female traders in the South who use the “wandering ghost metaphor to describe how loyal-cadres-turned ghosts have little choice but to prey on the traders” (8). As she notes, the metaphor of wandering ghosts for Vietnam southerners illustrates that “daily life is sinister” (8) and the ways in which “ghosts figure in contemporary Viet Nam as a way to talk about the consequences of the war” (9). Heonik Kwon contends that ghosts are vital to the living and acts of storytelling; ghosts are not just harbingers of the past but actors in the making of a sociocultural narrative about grief and accountability. For the storyteller, relaying the power of ghosts is a “powerful, effective means of historical reflection and self-expression” (2). 2. I borrow this term from Avery F. Gordon’s influential book on ghosts, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (1997). 3. One of the first films made in Vietnam was the ghost film Cańh D- ông Ma (Field of Ghosts) (1937). Subsequent films about ghosts are few and far between, with several films having been made in South Vietnam during the war with the Americans

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and shortly after the war ended: they are Lê: Da- ´ (Tears of Stone) (1971) by Vo˜ Doa- `n Chaû, Con Ma Nha` Ho: Hu’a (The Hua Family Ghost) (1972) by Leˆ Hoa`ng Hoa, and Ngoî Nha` Oan Khôc (House of Gross Injustices) (1992) by Leˆ Mô: ng Hoa`ng. 4. For Jacques Derrida, the trace embodies the notion of diffe´rance and is the mark of the occult. He writes:

The trace, where the relationship with the other is marked, articulates its pos- sibility in the entire field of the entity [étant], which metaphysics has defined as the being-present starting from the occulted movement of the trace. The trace must be thought before the entity. But the movement of the trace is necessarily occulted, it produces itself as self-occultation. When the other announces itself as such, it presents itself in the dissimulation of itself. (47)

5. KCET, Los Angeles, broadcast a segment, “With Reverse Migration, Children of Immigrants Chase ‘American Dream’ Abroad” (2013), about Asian immigrants who return to Asia to live and work. 6. This resolution is known as the Politburo Resolution No. 36 NQ/TW (26 March 2004). As Christian Collet and Hiroko Furuya contend, “This was the first resolution by the Politburo of the [Commumist Party of Vietnam] on the subject, making it a more meaningful and powerful statement in the context of Vietnamese domestic politics” (70). 7. In his essay, “Saigon from the Diaspora” (2008), Ashley Carruthers studies the ways that diasporic representations of Saigon are not merely made up of nostalgic images, arguing that the reception of these images, in fact, varies, depending on age and gender. 8. In 2013, Bu: i D- o’i Cho:’ Lo’n (Dust of Life in Cholon) was leaked on the Internet. Directed by the most popular Vietnamese American filmmaker working in Vietnam today, Charlie Nguyen, the film was initially banned from exhibiting in the country and outside its borders because of its images of gang violence and the ineffective role of police authorities featured in the film. After this deba- cle, the film was pirated and can now be purchased in Vietnamese American community enclaves, such as in Orange County, and on the streets in Saigon. 9. The phrase “Viet Film Wave” was used in Californian newspapers to describe a group of young Vietnamese Americans (some of whom are mixed race) who immigrated to the United States after the fall of Saigon and have been working on films with one another since the beginnings of their film careers. They include Ham Tran (Journey from the Fall [2006]), Stephane Gauger (The Owl and the Sparrow [2009]), Victor Vu (Blood Letter [2012]), and Charlie Nguyen (The Rebel [2007]). See Richard Chang and My-Thuan Tran. 10. The Vietnamese diaspora also call this day and the events that commemorate the “fall” of Saigon “Black April” or, in Vietnamese, Nga`y Quôc Hâ: n, which translates

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as “National Day of Resentment.” In Vietnam, however, this day is referred to as the “Liberation of Saigon” or Nga`y Giaœi Phońg Saigon. 11. OC Weekly ran a five-page article on the possible demise of variety shows such as Paris by Night (Kornhaber). On Paris by Night, my observations have been sharp- ened by the readings on gender and performance in the work of Nhi Lieu, Kieu- Linh Caroline Valverde, and Thuy Vo Dang. 12. Vivian Sobchack argues that the horror and science fiction genres come together in the family melodrama, wherein the child represents both past and future and indicates through their acts of terror “patriarchy’s decline” (153). 13. Philip Taylor writes that South Vietnam after 1975 was to be “treated with the same caution . . . reserved for unexploded mines, toxic chemical dumps, or other dangerous military ordnance. Cities, consumer lifestyles, markets and pop music tapes were not viewed as indices of South Vietnam’s encounter with modernity, but as dangerous threats” (32).

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Fischer, Lucy. “Birth Traumas: Parturition and Horror in Rosemary’s Baby.” The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: U of Texas P, 1996. 412-31. Print. Fjelstad, Karen, and Thi Hien Nguyen. Introduction. Possessed by the Spirits: Mediumship in Contemporary Vietnamese Communities. Ed. Fjelstad and Nguyen. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2006. 7-17. Print. Gammeltoft, Tine. Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in Vietnam. Berkeley: U of California P, 2014. Print. Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Print. Gustafsson, Mai Lan. War and Shadows: The Haunting of Vietnam. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2009. Print. Harms, Erik. “Eviction Time in the New Saigon: Temporalities of Displacement in the Rubble of Development.” Cultural Anthropology 28.2 (2013): 344-68. Print. Hjort, Mette. “On the Plurality of Cinematic Transnationalism.” World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives. Ed. Natasˇa Durovicova´ and Kathleen Newman. New York: Routledge, 2010. 12-33. Print. Knee, Adam. “Thailand Haunted: The Power of the Past in the Contemporary Thai Horror Film.” Horror International. Ed. Steven Jay Schneider and Tony Williams. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2005. 141-59. Print. Kornhaber, Spencer. “We’ll Always Have ‘Paris by Night.’” OC Weekly. OC Weekly, 24 June 2010. Web. 30 Aug. 2010. Kwon, Heonik. Ghosts of War in Vietnam. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. Print. Leshkowich, Ann Marie. “Wandering Ghosts of Late Socialism: Conflict, Metaphor, and Memory in a Southern Vietnamese Marketplace.” Journal of Asian Studies 67.1 (2008): 5-41. Print. Lieu, Nhi. The American Dream in Vietnamese Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011. Print. Lim, Bliss Cua. “Spectral Times: The Ghost Film as Historical Allegory.” positions 9.2 (2001): 287-329. Ngoî Nha` Trong Heœm [House in the Alley]. Dir. Leˆ Va˘n Kiê: t. Perf. Ngoˆ Thanh Vaˆn, Trân Baœo So’n, and Buì Haœi Va˘n. Crea Television, 2103. Film. Nguyen, Viet Thanh. “Speak of the Dead, Speak of Vietnam: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Minority Discourse.” The New Centennial Review 6.2 (2006): 7-37. Print. Nguy^~en-Vo˜, Thu-Hu’o’ng. “History Interrupted: Life after Material Death in South Vietnamese and Diasporic Works of Fiction.” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 3.1 (2008): 1-35. Print. Norindr, Panivong. “The Future of Lao Cinema.” Visual Anthropology 30: 2-3 (2017): 22-59. Print. Norton, Barley. Songs for the Spirits: Music and Mediums in Modern Vietnam. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2009. Print.

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Pham, Nga. “Vietnam’s Diaspora Urged to Return Home.” BBC News. BBC, 24 Nov. 2009. Web. 13 May 2016. “Remittances to Developing Countries to Stay Robust This Year, Despite Increased Deportations of Migrant Workers, Says WB.” The World Bank. The World Bank Group, 11 Apr. 2014. Web. 11 July 2014. Schwenkel, Christina. “Post/Socialist Affect: Ruination and Reconstruction of the Nation in Urban Vietnam.” Cultural Anthropology 28.2 (2013): 252-77. Print. Small, Ivan V. “Embodied Economies: Vietnamese Transnational Migration and Return Regimes.” Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 27.2 (2012): 234-59. Print. Sobchack, Vivian. “Bringing It All Back Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange.” The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: U of Texas P, 1996. 143-63. Print. Tai, Hue-Tam Ho. “Faces of Remembrance and Forgetting.” The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam. Ed. Hue-Tam Ho Tai. Berkeley: U of California P, 2001. 167-95. Print. Taylor, Philip. Fragments of the Present: Searching for Modernity in Vietnam’s South. Honolulu: U Hawaii P, 2001. Print. Tran, Dan. “Hello and Question.” Message to the author. 2 Oct. 2011. E-mail. Tran, My-Thuan. “Making Waves.” Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times, 18 Jan. 2009. Web. 20 Jan. 2009. Tran, Viet Van. “The Viet Kieu Filmmakers.” Vietnamese Cinema: Le Cine´ma Vietnamien. Ed. Philippe Dumont and Kirstie Gormley. Lyon: Asiexpo, 2007. 205-09. Print. Valverde, Caroline Kieu-Linh. “Making Vietnamese Music Transnational: Sounds of Home, Resistance, and Change.” Amerasia Journal 29.1 (2003): 29-49. Print. “With Reverse Migration, Children of Immigrants Chase ‘American Dream’ Abroad” Prod. Dina Demetrius and Cathy Hue. KCET, Los Angeles. 16 Jan. 2013. Television. Woodside, Alexander. “The Struggle to Rethink the Vietnamese State in the Era of Market Economics.” Culture and Economy: The Shaping of Capitalism in Eastern Asia. Ed. Timothy Brook and Hy Van Luong. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997. 61-78. Print. Wang, Chih-ming. “Politics of Return: Homecoming Stories of the Vietnamese Diaspora.” positions 21.1 (2013): 161-87. Print. Yamashiro, Jane. “Ethnic Return Migration Policies and Asian American Labor in Japan and Korea.” AAPI Nexus: Policy, Practice and Community 10.1 (2012): 23-39. Print. Zhang, Li. “Afterword: Flexible Postsocialist Assemblages from the Margin.” positions 20.2 (2012): 659-67. Print.

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