EAST, WEST, 'HOME' IS BEST? Vietnamese refugees and their relations to home and homeland Thesis submitted for the degree of cand. polit. by Marie Louise Seeberg Institute and Museum of Anthropology University of Oslo. April 1996 1 To my parents 2 Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................... 4 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................... 1 PART ONE - REFUGEES AND NATIONS: THE UNBELONGING ........................ 14 CHAPTER II WHAT BROUGHT THEM HERE? ............................................................ 15 CHAPTER III IMPOSING ORDER: CONTROL AND ASSISTANCE .......................... 30 PART TWO - AN EXILED WAY OF LIFE ....................................................................... 51 CHAPTER IV RECONSTRUCTING HOME ................................................................... 52 CHAPTER V FOOD AS SUBSTANCE; FOOD AS SYMBOL. ........................................ 65 CHAPTER VI ALTARS IN EXILE ..................................................................................... 88 PART THREE - TOWARDS NEW BELONGINGS ..................................................... 119 CHAPTER VII STRUCTURAL OPPOSITIONS ............................................................. 120 CHAPTER VIII VIET KIEU COMMUNITY ................................................................... 147 CHAPTER IX AFTER EXILE ............................................................................................ 165 Abbreviations: ............................................................................................................. 195 Vietnamese terms used in the text, with diacritical marks: ............................... 196 Vietnamese (variously defined), by country of residence: ................................. 198 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis could not have come into being without the help and co-operation of many Vietnamese refugees in Norway. My debt of gratitude to them, to their families in Vietnam, as well as to all the other people who helped me in Vietnam, remains unpaid. Ngo Thanh Tam was my teacher of Vietnamese for nearly two years, and I am especially grateful to him and to his family for their patience and encouragement. I also wish to thank Vuong Thanh for his kindness in assisting and interpreting for me during fieldwork. At the beginning of fieldwork, Kari-Mette Eidem gave me my indispensable Vietnamese-English dictionary, and she has shared with me some of her knowledge of the position and experiences of Vietnamese refugees in Norway. My thanks are due to my supervisors, Arne Røkkum, who helped me sort out my material during the first part of the project, and Anh Nga Longva, whose guidance, support and enthusiasm helped me complete it. The Institute and Museum of Anthropology at the University of Oslo contributed financially to my fieldwork in Norway as well as to my journey to Vietnam. They also helped finance my trip to the Refugee Studies Programme's IRAP Conference in Oxford in 1994, and the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies supported my visit to Copenhagen during their 1993 conference on Vietnam studies. I am grateful to my mother, Elizabeth S. Seeberg, as well as to Randi Davenport and Frøydis Kvaløy, for having read and commented the whole thing at the end - and to Ingebjørg Myhr, Esben Leifsen, and Majken Solberg, for going through parts of it along the way - they have all been merciless, yet constructive, in their comments and discussions. Astrid Anderson helped me draw the picture of Hung's two levels in chapter 6. Many other fellow students have contributed indirectly, through hours of discussion and probably, if added up, weeks of more or less necessary breaks. Had it not been for family and friends in the world out there, I would surely have forgotten to eat and sleep. Nobody seems to mention librarians. Where would we be without the patience and assistance of these professional people? I thank them all. The mistakes are my own. Oslo, April 1996 4 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION ...most refugees want to return home above everything else... (Loescher 1989) - Refugee, go home! - He would if he could. (UNHCR poster) Wenn jemand eine Reise tut, dann kann er 'was erzählen.1 How much the travellers can tell, and the degree of interest of their adventures to others, depend not only on their gifts for observation and for telling a story, but on the amount and nature of their experiences before leaving, while away, and upon return. Surely few people have a greater potential for narration than refugees do. However, their stories engage not primarily because the people have much to tell, but because their stories are not only their own. Theirs are stories of politics, of human rights issues, of history and contemporary history, of geography and of ways of life different from ours. 'Exactly because he destroys the old trinity of state-nation-territory, the refugee, an apparently marginal figure, deserves to be (...) considered as the central figure of our political history.' (Agamben 1993, as quoted in Warner 1994:16) Refugees' stories are also stories of human reactions to the most extreme situations imaginable - and sometimes beyond - of war, terror, chaos, oppression, exodus, 1 "Anyone who makes a journey will have something to narrate". Originally Wenn jemand eine Reise tut, so kann er was erzählen from the poem Urians Reise by Matthias Claudius (1740-1815), this line has become a German proverb. 1 loss, and coping. For if our travellers had not somehow been able to cope, they would not have been there to tell us of the journey. Through working as a municipal "refugee counsellor" for four years, I had the fortune to meet a few hundred of the over one million men, women and children who have left Vietnam since 1975. Through my fieldwork I have come to know some of these people quite well, the contact no doubt facilitated by the fact that many of them already knew me. On the other hand, my former position as a Norwegian bureaucrat also probably influenced some of the refugees' attitudes towards me, with varying implications for my fieldwork.2 I attempt to explore meanings of home and homeland to some Vietnamese refugees, in the face of a dramatically changing political climate. More specifically: how do the present policies of doi moi ("renovation", "perestrojka"), as well as increasing international emphasis on repatriation as "the best solution to the refugee problem", affect the concepts of home and of homeland? How do people try to control the situation and to consolidate, or change, their identity as refugees? As Longva (1994) puts it, exile populations consist of men and women who 'are not supposed to belong to where they live and do not live where they are supposed to belong'. My emphasis will be on the first part of this dilemma, on the supposition that the refugees really belong "there", not "here". This supposition is an underlying premise in policy-makers' justifications of repatriation as the best solution not only for the host countries, the United Nations' High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the countries of origin, but also for the refugees themselves. It has until recently not been discussed to any significant degree in academic work. Through focusing on this problem I hope to show some of the implications of being a refugee in a changing world. By directing attention to the transnational aspects of refugee life-worlds, the thesis will also bring into focus the intersections between micro levels and the levels of interaction between and within nation-states. 2 Cf. chapter 4. 2 Barbara Harrell-Bond, director of the Refugee Studies Programme (RSP) at Oxford tells the following story (Harrell-Bond 1992): she had been invited to give a talk at a Rotary club or some similar institution, her audience being educated men at the height of their careers, prepared to spend some of their surplus time and money on charity. She asked them, 'How many of you are still living in the place where you were born?' Two or three in the audience of thirty put their hands up. 'So why don't the rest of you just go home?!' was her follow-up. Of course, there was no answer. Somehow it was the wrong question - to some because they felt that their present place of dwelling and work was their home, to others because the place they might have liked to return to, had changed so much it no longer felt like home, or because they themselves had changed too much to feel at home in their place of origin. It all depends on what you mean by "home". For refugees, the paradox is not simply that they would like to go home but cannot. As time passes, it may be no more evident to them what constitutes "home" than it is to others who have grown attached to more than one place. The question 'why don't you just go home?' is one they may hear from time to time, posed by members of the "host" society or by fellow refugees, or family and friends in the country of origin. As time passes, it is also something many refugees ask themselves: am I staying "here", or going back "there"? It is a question with many aspects, both practical and emotional, political and personal. My thesis is an attempt to draw attention to various aspects, implications and meanings of "home" and "homeland" as seen by some Vietnamese refugees in Norway. It is thus not my intention to answer Dr. Harrell-Bond's question on behalf of these or any other of the world's millions of refugees. At the outset, I intended