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

Dpr Rtrn nd th n f Vtn rn ht Fl n Vtn Ln Dn L: ltthn Ltrtr f th .., Vl 4, Nbr , Fll 206, pp. 0 (rtl Pblhd b xfrd nvrt Pr Fr ddtnl nfrtn bt th rtl http:.jh.drtl666 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 MELUS Volume 41 Number 3 (Fall 2016) 153 Duong 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 global- izing 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 dif- ference 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, indi- cating 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 mar- kets. 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, direc- tors, and producers return to the country in order to make a variety of 155 Duong 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.

Load more