Organizer and Chair: Jason A. Picard, University of California, Berkeley

Discussant: Cam N. Nguyen, University of California, Berkeley

This panel explores the history of literature and the literary culture of the southern Republic of Vietnam (RVN) between 1954 and 1975. Since the defeat of the RVN by the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in 1975, little attention has been paid the social, cultural and intellectual life under the southern regime. Writers connected to the RVN have been excluded from the contemporary literary canon within Vietnam itself, and many of their works continue to be banned by the government. Foreign scholarship on modern Vietnamese literature exhibits a similar bias with most studies addressing northern writers and their works during the late colonial, high communist or post-Renovation periods.

The scholarly neglect of southern literature from the 1950s, 60s and 70s is unfortunate for several reasons. The relatively liberal publishing atmosphere in the RVN generated a complex literary culture spearheaded by a large and diverse group of talented writers. The relative freedom that southern writers enjoyed allowed them to capture aspects of the Vietnamese war and the war-era within their work that do not appear in the tightly censored communist-controlled literature. Moreover, literature produced under the RVN provides a fascinating insight into the complexities and internal dynamics of a society that has often been seen as defined exclusively by its relationship with the US.

By offering a series of papers, each on a specific southern Vietnamese writer and their work, our panel hopes to stimulate revisionist thinking about the nature of society, culture and politics under the Republic of Vietnam.

Thu-huong Nguyen-vo, University of California, Los Angeles

It is often said that diasporic literature in Vietnamese has been an extension of South Vietnamese literature. In this paper, I examine the modes of representation of materiality as a marker of the sense of the real in South Vietnamese writings as opposed to those in diasporic writings in Vietnamese. I argue that in most South Vietnamese works, while representations of the material range from idealism to nihilism to quotidian embodiment, they do not cause a significant epistemological disruption posing problems in the intelligibility of their texts. What they challenge are the various values of their time—colonialist, communist, traditionalist. Diasporic writings in Vietnamese, on the other hand, often profoundly disrupt readers’ epistemological ordering and push them towards a much more radically indeterminate reality. This latter may reflect a combination of the condition of diaspora and late capitalism. But rather than making an argument of pure discontinuity, I would also draw attention to a genealogy of various threads of linguistic deployment in the two literatures.

I examine three short stories from South Vietnam representative of a range of treatments of the material in the 1954-1975 period: Doan Quoc Si’s "Chiec Chieu Hoa Cap Dieu" (The red-bordered mat), Duong Nghiem Mau’s "Cung Danh" (Resigned), and Tran Thi NgH’s "Nha Co Cua Khoa Trai" (The house with its door locked from the inside). Illustrations from diasporic writings come from the 1990s and early 2000s: Ho Minh Dung’s "Nguoi An May Tren Pho Bolsa" (The beggar on Bolsa’s Street), and "Cau Dau Tram," Thuong Quan’s "Chiec Thau Dong" (The bronze tub), Tran Vu’s "Giac Mo Tho," (Turkish dream), and Dang Tho Tho’s "Mo Tuong Lai" (Open the future).

Jason A. Picard, University of California, Berkeley

In 1954, as many as a million Vietnamese in northern Vietnam migrated south following the conclusion of the Geneva Conference. Among the waves of refugees was an eighteen year old, Duong Nghiem Mau. Over the next four years Mau would move to three different cities – Hue, Nha Trang and Saigon- in the newly formed Republic of Vietnam (RVN). Mau’s experience as a refugee, his adolescent encounters with the First Indochina War and his life as a young adult amid the rising political tensions of the South became the backdrops and themes of his short stories and novels. Mau’s protagonists are Vietnamese youths struggling with social upheaval and personal/internal conflict.

This paper will examine the works of one of the best known Vietnamese writers of South Vietnam, Duong Nghiem Mau. Due to his own experiences and attention to youth culture, Mau offers his readers windows onto the youth of the RVN during the 1950s, 60s and 70s. The youth of South Vietnam played dramatic roles in the history of the period but they are largely ignored in existing scholarship. My exploration of the works of Duong Nghiem Mau will contribute to a more substantive understanding of the Republic of Vietnam, its literature and its youth culture.

Duy Nguyen, University of California, Irvine

Between 1954 and 1975, a collection of dozens of spy novels by Vietnam’s Ian Fleming, Nguyen Thu Tam, gripped the imagination of the southern Republic of Vietnam (RVN). The central figure of these stories is Z-28, a character fashioned after his British counterpart James Bond. One aspect of these novels is the presentation of images of and responses to the emasculation of the Vietnamese man in the RVN in the face of external influences and furious social transformation. Ironically, like Nguyen Thu Tam’s novels themselves, in which he takes plots and themes of western construction and applies them to a Vietnamese milieu, many Vietnamese of South Vietnam felt subjected as the US government attempted similar imposition of "structure" in the application of modernization theory to the Vietnamese society. Thus my paper will explore those images and responses present in the novels. In so doing, I will explore feelings of nationalism fueled by senses of inadequacy, powerlessness in the face of war and social development as well as the image of the "foreign" present in Nguyen Thu Tam’s serial. Finally, the paper will examine why this series has continued to resonate in overseas Vietnamese communities since 1975.

John C. Schafer, Humboldt State University

Since first capturing the attention of Vietnamese youth in the southern Republic of Vietnam over forty years ago, Trinh Cong Son’s music was often suppressed by both North and South Vietnam regimes and then by the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Yet in spite of various prohibitions, he has remained one of the most popular singers and composers in Vietnam and within the overseas Vietnamese community. And since Trinh Cong Son’s death in 2001, his music has been the source of countless Vietnamese analyses and tributes in an effort to discern what was and is the attraction of the Trinh Cong Son phenomenon. Yet Western scholarship has given little examination of his music.

Therefore in this paper I will shed light on this giant of the modern Vietnamese literature and music scene by discussing one aspect of his work, namely the intense sadness of his lyrics. Influenced, I shall argue, by both Buddhism and existentialism, Trinh Cong Son appears to have lived life with death in mind. Buddhism teaches that one reaches the true meaning of the world only after renouncing it and for existentialism death is a "boundary situation" that gives meaning to life. In Trinh Song Son’s music death and life interpenetrate each other, each giving meaning to the other. For well over 40 years, Trinh Cong Son’s admirers have recognized this and it is one reason that his songs remain so popular throughout the Vietnamese Diaspora.