The Ironies of Freedom: Sex, Culture, and Neoliberal Governance in Vietnam

Conclusion

Conclusion AS HANOI WAS PREPARING for a series of Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summits in the latter half of 2006, the Vietnam Museumof EthnologyandtheVietnamRevolutionaryMuseumputon an exhibit from 16 June to 17 December called “Hanoi Life under the SubsidyEconomy:1975–1986.” APECistheregionalformof afreetrade alliance, putting Asian Pacific countries on the map of global trade. President George W. Bush was to attend the APEC summit in Hanoi in November, clearing the way for Vietnam’s entrance into the World Trade Organization (WTO), with its institutionalized neoliberal economics . Vietnam never looked so confidently toward a free and prosperous future. As the Asia Foundation’s in-country director Kim Ninh puts it in the Wall Street Journal, “Vietnam’s capital city is abuzz with an unusual spectacle: a museum exhibit that offers a pointed critique of the country’s socialist past.”1 Indeed the temporal and psychical past waswheretheexhibitplacedthedarkagesof thesocialistcommandeconomy , with all of its deprivation of citizens’ desires for material and cultural goods. Asspectatorsdescendedintothespaceof theexhibit,abannergreeted them with a summation of the “subsidy period” as “a tragi-heroic time that was also a costly lesson in the law of social development.”2 The narration highlights an ignorance of empirical and scientific societal dynamics,pavingthewayforabackwardgazefromapresentVietnamese locationof enlightenedknowledgeandpractices.Thesubterraneanfeel of the dimly lit exhibit space enclosed by earth-tone walls encouraged an archaeological journey into a layer of memory as sediment. The aestheticization of the displays evoked the tragi-heroic pathos alluded to by the museum banner. The tragedy of ignorance was matched by the heroism of the people who withstood the scarcity of goods. 243 An entire “period” materialized in the viewing of displayed artifacts or recreated spaces of constrained consumption, from rice depots, to bazaar, to living quarters, all allocated according to a distribution system explained in charts as based on rankings of citizens assigned by the state. Snatches of bilingual narration told both domestic and foreign visitors of Hanoians standing in lines from the wee hours of the morning for “moldy, smelly, and wormy rice” and of the heightened desires for goods so rare they acquired a semisacred status. The aesthetically pleasing suspension of these consumers’ items suggested such sacred status in the deprived lives of citizens. Spectators saw a precious bicycle suspended in midair and an egg, a bar of Camay soap, and a vial of monosodium glutamate all delicately, elegantly mounted and spotlighted . A set of popular rhymes of the period in large lettering on the wall illustrated an entire libidinal economy revolving around the rarity of goods: First, love the man who wears a singlet Second, love the man who has dried fish Third, love the man who cleans his face with a towel Fourth, love the man whose shorts have floral designs.3 The lack of choice in consumption was narrated by the exhibit as extending to cultural production. As writers, performers, and other artists “had early on realized the constraints and problems of the realityof lifeatthattime,”their“experimentationshadmetwithmanydifficulties because of a manner of management that bound them in the confines of regimentation.”4 The narration linked the lack of artistic freedom for cultural producers to the lack of freedom for consumers: “Duetoastrictandrigidstatemanagementof allartforms,alotof people couldnotaccessartworkdespite[theartwork’s]highartisticandhumanistic value.”5 The narration cinched the definition of freedom as choice in consumption of material and cultural goods: “The period of Bao cấp [subsidy] has been known as a time of hardship, when mechanisms of social-economic management were inappropriate, causing privation in people’smaterialandspirituallife.Productivitywasconstrainedandsociety stagnated. Humans were limited in their creativity, and they lacked choice in their enjoyment.”6 244 Conclusion The narration of the lack of choice in production and consumption of bothmaterialandculturalgoodsasunfreedommakesevidentthecurrent state of freedom enabled by an abundance of goods. Acknowledgementof pastunfreedominnostalgicandtragi-heroicpathosevoked patrioticsentiments,astestifiedinwrittencommentsleftbyVietnamese patronsintheexhibitlog.Oneteenagergushed,“IloveVietnam.”What the exhibit left unsaid was the very premise upon which such narrative could have been understood: the reorganization of the libidinal economyaroundanewsystemof thedistributionof goods. Atthesametime, the exhibit officiated a collective disavowal of the current mix of disciplinary and repressive governmental power sustained by conditions of the neoliberal global economy. This claim of freedom to produce, to sell, and to consume coincided with the APEC summit and Vietnam’s final phases of application into the WTO, symbolic of the complete integration of Vietnam into the regional and global economy based on neoliberal economics. The face of Vietnam that the exhibit put forward to the world asserted a temporal distance between past unfreedom...