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Imagining Saigon: American Interpretations of Saigon in the Twentieth Century

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Imagining Saigon: American Interpretations of Saigon in the Twentieth Century W&M ScholarWorks Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 2013 Imagining Saigon: American Interpretations of Saigon in the Twentieth Century Evan Cordulack College of William & Mary - Arts & Sciences Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd Part of the American Studies Commons, Asian Studies Commons, and the Journalism Studies Commons Recommended Citation Cordulack, Evan, "Imagining Saigon: American Interpretations of Saigon in the Twentieth Century" (2013). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. Paper 1539623361. https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-r50m-wm81 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Imagining Saigon: American Interpretations of Saigon in the Twentieth Century Evan Cordulack Decatur, Illinois Master of Arts, College of William & Mary, 2005 Bachelor of Arts, College of William & Mary, 2003 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the College of William and Mary in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy American Studies Program The College of William and Mary January 2013 © Copyright by Evan Cordulack 2012 APPROVAL PAGE This Dissertation is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Evan Cordulack Approved by the Committee, November, 2012 Committee Co-Chair, Associate Professor Lei^M eyer C ollege of William & Mary Committee Co-Chair Associate Professor Hiroshi Kitamura C ollege of William & Mary yAsspciaty professor Charles McCSdvern sge/of William & Mary A ssociate Professor Kristin H oganson University of Illinois ABSTRACT Saigon has occupied an important place in the American imagination. Captivated by its French colonial past, a diverse array of American writers romanticized the city’s “tree-lined streets” as the “Paris of the East” and the “Pearl of the Orient.” As the United States extended its influence in Vietnam over the course of the twentieth Century, culminating during the 1960s, Saigon experienced America’s growing presence. Americans composed photographs and writings, both personal and published, to make sense of the changing city and the changing public opinion of the war. The juxtaposition of American- occupied French colonial architecture with the visual manifestations of a city at war (such as overcrowding, military personal, and bombed buildings) runs throughout American representations of Saigon. These representations transformed the romantically remembered boulevards into a dystopian vision of the South Vietnamese capital brimming with corruption, street vendors, sex workers, and bars. In order to convey different ideas about Saigon, many media producers and government officials relied on the bodies of the people in Saigon to convey different meanings. This project argues that American understandings of Saigon often relied on a reciprocal relationship between human bodies and the environment around them. Bodies lent meaning to aspects of the city while the city helped construct meanings around people’s bodies. In some cases, the bodies in question were those of Western men, but more often, the bodies of Vietnamese women did the work of creating American meanings for the city. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ii Chapter 1. Introduction 1 Chapter 2. Representations of Saigon in Print Culture through the 1950s 31 Chapter 3. The Quiet American: Graham Greene, Joseph Mankiewicz and the Imagining 1950s Saigon 77 Chapter 4. Protest and Public Space: Saigon during the 1963 “Buddhist Crisis” 109 Chapter 5. Else Baker: Viewing Saigon through American Domestic Spaces 157 Chapter 6. Sex, Policy, and Leisure: The American Impact on Saigon after Escalation 206 Chapter 7. Epilogue: Binaries, Myths and American Foreign Policy 249 Works Cited 260 Vita 276 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to my committee, Leisa Meyer (co-chair), Hiroshi Kitamura (co-chair), Charlie McGovern, and Kristin Hoganson for their guidance and help with this project. The research for my dissertation would have been impossible to conduct without the financial support of numerous sources. At the College of William and Mary, the American Studies Program and Arts and Sciences Office of Graduate Research both awarded me grants to conduct archival research. Outside of the College, the Massachusetts Historical Society’s support in the form of a short term research grant and inclusion in their vibrant academic community in Boston for several weeks was crucial in research Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.’s time in Saigon. I am also indebted to the U.S. Department of Education and the staff and faculty at Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute for the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship that allowed me to study Vietnamese. I also wish to thank the staff at the Western Historical Manuscript Collection, University of Missouri and at the National archives for their expert guidance in navigating their collections. Thank you to my friends and family both at William & Mary and elsewhere for their help and support over the past 9 years of graduate study. I can’t imagine completing this dissertation without them. Introduction Saigon has occupied an important place in the American imagination. Captivated by its French colonial past, a diverse array of American writers romanticized the city’s “tree-lined streets”1 as the “Paris of the East”2 and the “Pearl of the Orient.”3 As the United States extended its influence in Vietnam over the course of the twentieth Century, culminating during the 1960s, Saigon experienced America’s growing presence. Americans composed photographs and writings, both personal and published, to make sense of the changing city and the changing public opinion of the war. The juxtaposition of American-occupied French colonial architecture with the visual manifestations of a city at war (such as overcrowding, military personal, and bombed buildings) runs throughout American representations of Saigon. These representations transformed the romantically remembered boulevards into a dystopian vision of the South Vietnamese capital brimming with corruption, street vendors, sex workers, and bars.4 This project deconstructs Saigon’s trajectory from the romantic town Americans described before the American War in Vietnam to the sprawling, vice- filled city they left in 1975. However, we cannot examine these two poles, clean and 1 Jack Langguth, “Saigon Tries to Live in a Hurry,”New York Times, August 8, 1965. 2 Robert Trumbull “Still ‘Paris of the East’; South Vietnamese Live for Today Tomorrow May Bring Red Attack,”New York Times, June 3, 1961. 3 Homer Bigart, “Americans Placid Amid Saigon Peril,” New York Times, January 8, 1962. 4 R. W. Apple, Jr, “All Discomforts of Home,”New York Times, January 8, 1966; Stanley Kamow,Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking Press, 1983), 35. romantic/dirty and dangerous, using the convenience of timeline. The Saigon Americans encountered and represented in media did not start as safe and end as dangerous. Rather, this binary shifted constantly. At times, competing versions of the city emerged at the same time among different factions of Americans. Multiple versions of Saigon continually emerged in the American media, changing slightly each time, but generally orbiting the romantic/dangerous binary. The ability for Saigon to have multiple meanings flows from the relationship between the its built, lived, and imagined environments. French Colonial buildings carried a history of the French presence in Saigon while the Americans living in Saigon experienced changes in the city, such as an increase in refugees or violence. At the same times, American writers and readers, both in Vietnam and in the United States, watched, looked at, and read media that described the city—conjuring a version of the city in their imaginations. From each of these sources came different meanings of the city that combined to be how Americans understood Saigon. Along the same lines, in order to understand what Saigon “was” to Americans, this project takes into consideration different elements of the American presence in Saigon. It at once considers the ways in which the United States contributed to the physical environment in Saigon, the actions of American government and military officials who influenced the lived experiences of the Americans living in the city, and various constructions of the city through the media. In order to convey different ideas about Saigon, many media producers and government officials relied on the bodies of the people in Saigon to convey different 3 meanings. This project argues that American understandings of Saigon often relied on the interpretation of human bodies in order to lend meaning to aspects of the city. In some cases, the bodies in question were those of Western men, but more often, the bodies of Vietnamese women did the work of creating American meanings for the city. Depending on the viewer and the body being viewed, American, British, French, and Vietnamese bodies of different genders embodied meanings and judgments about their respective nations and ethnicities. While this project does not engage with the same primary sources, it builds on the work of Sue Sun’s work about the relationship between the US military population, Vietnamese prostitutes and venereal disease.
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