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Introduction Remembering (in) Vietnam Friday evening, November 17, 2000. Returning from an art performance on the outskirts of Hanoi, I came upon large crowds of people lining Trang Tiền Street in the city center, a sea of people stretched from the colonial-era Opera House down past Hoàn Kiếm Lake several blocks away. There was no way through; the entire area was blocked to traffic. I parked my motorbike and joined a group of people to wait for the spectacle to begin. The excitement mounted. People grew anxious. A few minutes later the crowds began to stir. “Here they come!” someone yelled. Slowly, in royal fashion, the motorcade approached. People began to cheer and applaud. Like everyone around me, I strained to get a good look through the dense pack of spectators . The cheering grew louder. People waved and shouted hello. Inside the black limousine flying the U.S. and Vietnamese flags at either front end, Bill and Hillary Clinton smiled and waved back through closed windows. The bystanders remained fixed in place watching the remaining vehicles drive by. I looked around me. The predominantly young onlookers appeared most awed by the opportunity to see the U.S. president, while older crowd members acted more ambivalent. I turned to a middle-aged man next to me. “I’m only here because the roads are blocked and I can’t get home,” he told me defiantly. “No one wants to see thepresidentoftheUnitedStates.Weonlywanttoseethesecurityforceswe’veheard so much about. Your country spent over two million dollars on security! That’s what I want to see. Never before has there been such security in Vietnam, not even when the French president was here.” An elderly man who had approached us stood by listening, and then turned around and slowly walked away. He had no comment. 2 INTRODUCTION The security apparatus had indeed been the topic of much conversation and speculation over the previous week: how many people were accompanying Clinton for his three-dayvisittoVietnam(hundreds,itwasrumored,includingtwochefs),atwhich new five-star hotel would he stay (conflicting reports, but most assumed the newly opened Hilton Hanoi Opera), how many large black security vans, limousines, and other vehicles had been flown over the ocean in Air Force One? But there was more that drew the crowds than just the spectacle of U.S. wealth and power. The younger spectators around me saw it differently. Clinton’s celebrity excited them (“he’s so handsome!” one young woman exclaimed), as did his message: a global capitalist future with freedom and prosperity for all was the only path for Vietnam. As the first U.S. head of state to visit Vietnam since the end of the war, and the first ever to officially visit the capital city, Clinton’s journey was considered by many to mark an historic moment, a “new chapter” in postwar relations between two former rival countries. In the televised speech Clinton gave before a large crowd at the National University in Hanoi a day after his arrival, he carefully broached the topic of the war, at times diverting significantly from conventional U.S. political discourse, emphasizing, for example, the “common” and “deeply intertwined” histories and “shared suffering” that bonded the people of both countries into “a relationship unlike any other.” His carefully crafted words even made note of Vietnam ’s “staggering sacrifice” and its millions of “brave soldiers and civilians” who perished in the war, a much elided topic in U.S. public memory, which continues to see the war as traumatic for American society. Despite Clinton’s conscientious approach and gestures toward Vietnamese historical memory—he even referred at one point to “what you call the American War”—he also fell back upon more standard American paternalist roles and moral scripts of history. He commended the humanitarian efforts of U.S. veterans who had returned to Vietnam to “work on behalf of the Vietnamese people,” and the crucial role they had played in improving bilateral relations. Likewise, Clinton praised the Vietnamese people for their diligent efforts to help locate the remains of U.S. forces listed as “missing in action” (MIA). In an interview in Ho Chi Minh City on November 19, he reflected on an emotional visit to a MIA site: It was overwhelming . . . And we watched all those Vietnamese people working with the American people, up to their hips in mud, digging in the ground and taking these big chunks of mud over to sifters, and watching other Vietnamese...

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