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The Virgin Mary Became Asian: Diasporic Nationalism Among Vietnamese Catholic Refugees in the United States and Germany. Ninh, Thien-Huong. "The Virgin Mary Became Asian: Diasporic Nationalism among Vietnamese Catholic Refugees in the United States and Germany." Refugees and Religion: . By Birgit Meyer and Peter van der Veer. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. 68–86. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 1 Oct. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350167162.0011>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 1 October 2021, 02:34 UTC. Copyright © Birgit Meyer, Peter van der Veer and contributors 2021. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 4 The Virgin Mary Became Asian Diasporic Nationalism among Vietnamese Catholic Refugees in the United States and Germany Thien-Huong Ninh Introduction From June 8 to 10, 2019, in Aschaffenburg, Germany, more than 6,000 Vietnamese Catholics gathered to pray to Our Lady of Lavang (Figure 4.3) at the Forty-third National Congress of Vietnamese Catholics in Germany. According to community leaders and regular attendees, the number of visitors to the annual event has grown dramatically since Our Lady of Lavang became the patron saint of Vietnamese Catholics in Germany in 2013. Unlike other representations of the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Lavang is in the image of a Vietnamese woman wearing áodài (Vietnamese traditional costume) and holding baby Jesus. For nearly 100 years, she was represented as a European woman, modeled after Our Lady of Victories in Paris (Figure 4.1). However, in the mid-1990s, Vietnamese Catholics in the United States visually transformed Our Lady of Lavang into their ethnic image and received validation from the Catholic Church in their ancestral land, Vietnam. After receiving blessings from Pope John Paul II in Rome in 2002, six Vatican-blessed statues of the Vietnamese-looking Our Lady of Lavang were exported to six different countries across four continents. Vietnamese Catholics in Germany were selected as the guardian of the statue in Europe. Today, the Vietnamese-looking Our Lady of Lavang has become popular throughout the world. It is the only Asian form of the Virgin Mary that has become global. Throughout Asia, within the walls of parishes and confines of loose parish networks, there are local ethnic forms of the Virgin Mary, but none has been catapulted to a global scale as Our Lady of Lavang. The Virgin Mary Became Asian 69 Figure 4.1 Statue of Our Lady of Lavang representing the Virgin Mary as a European woman, modeled after Our Lady of Victories, in Lavang, Vietnam; photo by Thien- Huong Ninh. This phenomenon of religious transnationalism and diasporic formation, concurrent with ethnic revitalization and nationalism, among Vietnamese refugees and their descendants is the focus of this chapter, particularly their communities in the United States and Germany. How and why do they look to Our Lady of Lavang as a modality to reconnect with each other, locally and globally? I argue that, through the Vietnamese-looking Our Lady of Lavang, Vietnamese Catholic refugees have elevated diasporic nationalism to a global level of religious sanctity. I illustrate that they have utilized Our Lady of Lavang in the image of a Vietnamese woman to recentralize their global religious community based on a common faith, ethnic culture, and political positionalities as refugees displaced from their homeland and excluded from full incorporation into their host societies. This ethnic image was visually created in the United States, sent to Vietnamese Catholics in Vietnam for validation, and then exported to the rest of the world, including Germany. I contend that Vietnamese Catholic refugees and their descendants uphold Our Lady of Lavang as an emblem of their deterritorialized nation in the diaspora, an imagined community that exists beyond the territorial boundaries of their dead homeland (South Vietnam) and new host societies. Thus, the global circuit of this ethnic Virgin Mary does not simply draw upon religious and cultural repertoire of holy mother devotional practices in Vietnam, 70 Refugees and Religion which was closed off from them for nearly twenty years due to the US trade embargo against the country between 1975 and 1995. Moreover, the globalization and Vietnamization of Our Lady of Lavang are simply not due to policies of multiculturalism within the Catholic Church and Western countries. These efforts represent a transnational project in which Vietnamese Catholic refugees strategize to create an alternative sacred space of refuge to contest, negotiate, and divert the conditions of social, cultural, and political marginalization. I refer to “refugee” as an inclusive identification and an analytical framework, following the work of Espiritu (2014: 20–33). As a classification, it refers to individuals who are legally defined as such by resettling governments or international agencies as well as their descendants and individuals whose forced displacement has not been recognized by political and social institutions. While many (but not all) Vietnamese in the United States and Germany are either legally or voluntarily classified as refugees, studies have found that refugees’ experiences and status do not end with resettlement but continue to linger in their lives (Nguyen 2012: 911–42; Nguyen-Vo 2005: 157–75; Espiritu 2002: 372–5). These vestiges are often passed down onto their descendants and shape their worldviews. Moreover, following van der Veer’s works on narratives of nation, religion, and migration (2002; 1999; 1995), I employ refugee as an analytical framework to shine light on the multiplicities and asymmetries of power dynamics inherent in nation’s knowledge production about refugees and nonrefugees. In doing so, I hope to re-represent, recover, and reconstruct “refugee” as a “socio-legal object of knowledge” (Espiritu 2014: 18–25), rather than as simply dispossessed, traumatized, and helpless victims. In turn, this analytical approach opens up empirical and theoretical spaces for uncovering the “lived religion” (Orsi 2010: 13–27) of Vietnamese Catholic refugees. Background: Catholicism in Vietnam During the seventeenth century, about a hundred years after the arrival of Portuguese Catholic missionaries, French Catholic missionaries successfully made gradual inroads into Vietnamese society by acculturating Catholicism into the local culture (Dutton 2016: Chapter 1; Keith 2012: 55–88; Phan 1991: 2–8). However, it was not until French rule (1887–1954) that Catholicism enjoyed full integration and acceptance into Vietnamese society. The Catholic Church flourished under the French colonial government in terms of wealth and authority. It built schools, churches, and medical centers, many of which remain The Virgin Mary Became Asian 71 standing today. However, its strength has deteriorated since 1954, when French colonial rule was replaced by Vietnamese communist control—first in Northern Vietnam and, by 1975, in Southern Vietnam (Chu 2008: 162–7). Beginning in 1986, following policies of economic liberalization (ĐổiMới), the Vietnamese state slowly relaxed its control over religious practices (Fjelstad and Nguyen 2006: 9–11; Taylor 2004: 15–18; Taylor 2001: 23–30) and granted “qualified” religious freedom (Hansen 2009a: 185–92). As of 2014, the Catholic population in Vietnam is smaller only to that of Buddhist. There are approximately seven million Catholics in Vietnam (eight of the country’s population of ninety million), and they are heavily concentrated in the Southern region of Vietnam (Home Office 2018). The Religious and Symbolic Significance of Our Lady of Lavang The history of Our Lady of Lavang is an inflection of the history of Vietnamese Catholics as religious martyrs and refugees constantly fleeing from religious persecution. According to an oral tradition, in 1798 the Virgin Mary appeared several times to a group of Vietnamese Catholics who were fleeing from anti- Catholic persecutions in Lavang.1 She comforted them and said, “My children, have faith and be brave. I have heard your prayers. From now on, I will grant the wishes of all who come to me” (Tran 2009). Since then, Catholics and non- Catholics alike have sought refuge at the site of the apparition. Although the Vatican has not verified the historical accuracy of the apparition, Catholics and non-Catholics alike have continued to pray to Our Lady of Lavang. Except for a short hiatus due to war and violence during the 1970s, congresses have been held every two years to commemorate her apparition. In 1901, when Vietnam was under French colonialism and Catholicism was much more tolerated, the first Our Lady of Lavang church was built and completed on the site where she had appeared according to faithful Catholics. At this historic event, the sitting French bishop placed a French-modeled statue of Our Lady of Victories (Notre-Dame des Victoires) to represent Our Lady of Lavang in the new church (Figure 4.1). The Virgin Mary is depicted standing and wearing a crown and a draped dress; her hands are positioned to the right holding a baby Jesus, who is also crowned and standing on top of a globe. The Marian title “Our Lady of Victories” is old and tied to many names in the Christian world, most notably Our Lady of the Rosary (i.e., victory comes from the power of the Rosary). While the veneration of the Virgin Mary may 72 Refugees and Religion represent Catholic conquest over and absorption of paganistic goddess-cults rooted in ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman cultures (Benko 2004: 5), the Marian imagery of Our Lady of Victories also embodies a distinctive French Catholic form and political conquests. Many French Catholics believed that the Virgin Mary intervened in the miraculous victory of the French over the Greeks in Constantinople in 1204, which marked the siege and sack of Constantinople in the culmination of the Fourth Crusade. Since then, they often appealed to Our Lady of Victories in times of political crisis and threats from religious heresies (Santoro 2011: 570).
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