Personal Sorrow: Cải Lương and the Politics of North and South Vietnam

The over-amplification of the Vietnamese "reformed opera" cải lương and a critique of its "excessive" nature facilitated the Vietnamese Communist Party's erasure of southern cul­ture and rebuilding of a unified new socialist state at the end of the Vietnam-American war. While cải lương became a metonymy for southern culture and terrain by marking the south as a "melodramatic" space in need of purification, a reformed cải lương was also used by the communist state to call abject and feminized citizens home in the creation of a new, unified nation.