Organizer: Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Harvard University
Chair: Marilyn B. Young, New York University
Discussant: Rubie S. Watson, Harvard University
Re-presenting Vietnam's War Experience: The Manufacture of Nostalgia in Vietnam's
Tourist Industry
Laurel Kennedy and Mary Rose Williams, Denison University
Since 1986, when Vietnam initiated the development of its tourist industry as a means of generating foreign currency, tourism has grown rapidly. The number of visitors has increased more than ten-fold, foreign investment in hotels, resorts, and recreational venues has outpaced all other sectors except oil, and governmental bureaucracy has been substantially reduced to facilitate both entry to Vietnam and travel beyond major cities into the interior. While many of the visitors are Viet Kieu, the majority are Europeans and, increasingly, Americans-often Vietnam War veterans or students of that war's history, for whom there is natural tourist appeal in the war experience. Vietnam's quasi-governmental tourism boards, often in joint ventures with foreign capitalists, have responded to this particular interest in three primary ways: by developing significant war sites such as China Beach and Cam Ranh Bay as recreation and resort areas catering to wealthy foreigners; by reorienting the experience of war memorial sites to mute travellers' memories of defeat; and by erasing from tourists' view those historical images and experiences which would most dampen and disturb holiday spirits. This paper examines some of the political economic causes and consequences of this re-presentation of Vietnam's engagement with France and the United States as a tourist attraction. It examines the discursive and non-discursive symbols used to promote Vietnam as a tourist destination, considers the nature and packaging of the country's tourist attractions, especially those associated with the war, and the implications of this re-presentation for Vietnam's political memory and its political agenda.
Heroic Mothers and Grasping Wives: Remembrance and Amnesia in Postwar Vietnam
Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Harvard University
In Vietnam as elsewhere, gender and memory are contested terrains. What happens when they are merged?
In 1994, the Vietnamese National Assembly set out criteria for granting the title of Heroic Mothers to women who had lost sons in the revolutionary cause. This paved the way for numerous photographic exhibits, ceremonies and parades throughout the country, and unleashed a flood of commemorative articles in the press. Honoring the war dead by paying homage to their mothers has proved a popular aspect of official commemoration. But the state has not been entirely successful in shaping collective memory. The figure of the mother is capable of being reworked into a counterhegemonic version of war and revolution. Furthermore, in honoring heroic mothers, the state unwittingly opened the way for a critical look at its failure to provide for them adequately in their old age.
As cultural emblems, heroic mothers must also compete with an equally familiar figure, that of the greed-driven woman who turns her back on memories of war and on the public good. How can women represent both the power of memory and the will to forget, both the revolutionary spirit of sacrifice and capitalist selfishness? This paper argues that contradictions within Vietnamese gender ideology have been made more salient by the unhealed pain of war, the contested legacy of revolution, and ambivalence about the emerging market-oriented society