The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation

4. Monumentalizing War: Toward a New Aesthetics of Memory

Monumentalizing War Toward a New Aesthetics of Memory Ðà Lạt, December 1997, Chicken Village Traveled outside the city of Ðà Lạt today, into the hills of the Central Highlands, on motorbikes with two ARVN veterans as the guides. The men approached me in the street with a book of photographs and recommendations from previous tourists. I agreed and off we went on their self-made tour. Along the way we stopped at an impoverished K’ho ethnic minority village, which the guides referred to as “Chicken Village” on account of a massive cement chicken statue that greets visitors, reportedly bestowed by the government upon the residents as a “reward” for resettling and abandoning a nomadic lifestyle (Figure 4.1). One of the guides criticized the monument and local authorities for wasting money on an impractical statue that could have been used to combat the area’s abject poverty. Ðà Nẵng, June 2000, Mother Courage “Put into action our heroic traditions” [Phát huy truyền thống anh hùng] read the street signs on my way to view the monument Mẹ Dũng Sĩ [Mother Courage] at the entrance to Ðà Nẵng city. The taxi driver, whose parents had worked for U.S. troops during the war, called the monumental statue, constructed in 1985 for the ten-year anniversary of national independence, a “symbol of patriotism and liberation ” (Figure 4.2). At the base of the monument, city regulations stipulated proper behavior: no petty trade, consumption of alcohol, waste disposal, or sports C H A P T E R F O U R Monumentalizing War 103 should take place in the immediate area. Such monuments honoring “heroic mothers ” [bà mẹ anh hùng] have been a point of scorn for many who see the government as having invested money in “useless” things like memorials, instead of supporting impoverished mothers who are often without family as a result of the war. “Invest more money in ‘gratitude houses’” [nhà tình nghĩa], for example, has been a common sentiment. Figure 4.1. “Chicken Village,” outside Ðà Lạt, Lâm Ðồng province. Photograph by the author. Figure 4.2. Mẹ Dũng Sĩ [Mother Courage], 1985, by artist Phạm Văn Hạng, Ðà Nẵng. Photograph by the author. Monumentalizing War 105 Ðiện Biên Phủ, June 2007, Eating the Statue Front-page coverage in the Vietnamese press: seven officials in the city of Ðiện Biên Phủ are arrested and charged with corruption in the 2004 construction of the Ðiện Biên Phủ victory monument that marked the fiftieth anniversary of Vietnam ’s defeat of the French on May 7, 1954 (Figure 4.3). The bronze, 12.6-meter statue—reportedly the largest of its kind in Vietnam—has since fallen into “serious disrepair,” according to the Lao Ðộng [Labor] newspaper (Duy Thanh 2007), on account of the embezzlement of project funds (30 percent, it is estimated) and the resulting shoddy and unaesthetic construction of the statue which now urgently requires additional funds for renovation. The case of the “eaten” monument has again engendered calls to halt the construction of costly [tốn kém] and unsightly [xấu xí] “foreign-style” statues. Recent years have seen a marked increase in the number of state memorial projects throughout Vietnam with the construction, renovation, and beautification of memorialtemples ,martyrcemeteries,monuments,andothernationalsitesofmemory. In Hanoi new and ambitious monument initiatives have coincided with extensive urban redevelopment projects and large-scale preparation for the upcoming thousand-year anniversary of the city’s founding (Nguyễn Vinh Phúc 2000, 13). Against the backdrop of such changes, this chapter examines recent shifts in the visual and cultural landscape of commemorative art and architecture, with an eye to aesthetic practices of nation building and memory making that have taken place in the post-economic reform era. As sites for the cultural and artistic expression of national values, sentiments, and ideals that are neither fixed nor agreed upon, state monuments reflect both the shifting sociohistorical and aesthetic contexts in which they are produced (J. Young 2000, 93). The three field note excerpts presented above span a decade of research interest in the contested terrain of monumentalization; in particular, critical responses to memorial proliferation and its reputed costly and substandard aesthetic production. Central to these debates have been politicized discussions about how to recognize, represent, and memorialize the past in cost-effective...