Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism

Introduction

Introduction With a flash of light, a newspaper photographer’s camera captured the moment of my family’s arrival to the United States in Butler, Pennsylvania , in 1975. This grainy, black-and-white image accompanied a story that detailed how my family members had become the wards of a Catholic Church and the first refugees to arrive in this small town. The photo shows my father, my five siblings, and me. A lieutenant colonel in the Southern Vietnamese army, my father had been forced to flee before April 30, 1975, the day Sài Gòn fell to the communists in the war with the Americans. My father was among those South Vietnamese who had served with the US government and the southern military and who were evacuated or fled for fear of communist reprisal. Had he stayed, as did some of his friends, he would have been reeducated because of his perceived collaboration with Việt Nam’s colonial and Cold War enemies. From the communist perspective, he was a traitor, and this picture of him in America was evidence of his betrayal. The photograph attests to something else: my mother’s absence. Not until I was much older did I realize that she was missing from the picture . She stayed behind when my father took the children and escaped from Sài Gòn. In the eyes of the communist regime, my mother might have been perceived as loyal to the national family because she stayed. From the war years through the postwar years, betrayal and loyalty would be important terms for both communists and noncommunists as they struggled over control of Việt Nam. Both sides often used charges 2 / introduction of collaboration and betrayal to redraw the bounds of nation. But by the late 1980s, those contentions had abated somewhat, at least in Việt Nam. In 1990, my mother was able to leave for the United States to be reunited with her grown children; conversely, overseas Vietnamese, including myself, began returning home. The staggered pattern of immigration and return that marks my family history is not unique. It demonstrates in concentrated form the kinds of jagged reunifications that took place for diasporans, as well as for those in Việt Nam, as families tried to reunify through multiple migrations and various homecomings in the postwar era. This incomplete family portrait speaks to the fractures of war and displacement, recalling the trauma of betrayal writ large for the postwar national family of Việt Nam. As my family history suggests, the Indochina wars are imbricated with charges of treason and collaboration, charges that might be reversed with a shift in the political wind. Indeed, the government condemned overseas Vietnamese, like my father, as traitors and collaborators after 1975, but following its embrace of economic market reforms began in 1986, the government slowly opened the country ’s doors, welcoming overseas Vietnamese as part of its transnational family. Diasporans now return home as tourists, investors, scholars, and artists. After denouncing collaboration as betrayal, the state has recently imbued the term with a positive connotation of joint endeavors and creative productions. While overseas Vietnamese are still seen as potential collaborators, the meaning of “collaborator” itself has changed from someone like my father, who betrays the country, to someone who aids the country. Given this history, Treacherous Subjects examines collaboration’s doubled meanings in the cultural politics of Việt Nam and its diasporic populations, particularly those who settled in the United States and France. Treacherous Subjects asks: What does it mean to be a collaborator ? How has collaboration been represented in history and culture? And how have collaborative practices been narrativized as acts of betrayal or loyalty? The book pivots on the word collaboration because of its vexed resonance within a modern Vietnamese history marked by French colonialism , US imperialism, Japanese occupation, and the economic role of foreign powers in postwar Việt Nam. This history shapes how Vietnamese subjectivities, both national and diasporan, are characterized by divided loyalties and shifting alliances. These treacherous subjects have been caught between opposing forces: nationalism, communism, occupying powers, and domestic states with competing claims to the name of introduction / 3 Việt Nam. Indeed, the aftereffects of colonialism and foreign occupation in Việt Nam have led to an anxiety about betrayal and its inverse, loyalty, embodying what Timothy Brook calls “collaboration’s haunting of the postwar world.”1 My...