Television in Post-Reform Vietnam
This book explores Vietnamese popular television in the post-Reform era,
that is, from 1986, focussing on the relationship between television and
­national ­imagination. It locates Vietnamese television in the experiences of
­everyday life and the prevailing network of power relations resulting from
­marketization and globalization, and, as such, moves beyond the clichéd
­assumption of ­Vietnamese media as a mere propagandist instrument of the
party state. With examples from a wide range of television genres, the book
demonstrates how Vietnamese television enables novel conditions of cultural
oppression as well as political engagement in the name of the n
­ ation. In sharp
contrast to the previous image of Vietnam as a war-torn land, post-­Reform
television conjures into being a new sense of national ­belonging based on an
implicit rejection of the socialist past, hopes for peace and prosperity, and
anxieties about a globalized future. This book highlights the richness of
Vietnam’s current culture and identity, characterized, the book argues, by
‘fraternity without uniformity’.
Giang Nguyen-Thu is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Advanced
­Research in Global Communication, University of Pennsylvania. She is also
an on-leave lecturer at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities,
Vietnam National University, Hanoi.
Media, Culture and Social Change in Asia
Series Editor
Stephanie Hemelryk Donald
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Gregory N. Evon, University of New South Wales
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Peter Horsfield, RMIT University, Melbourne
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Michael Keane, Curtin University
Tania Lewis, RMIT University, Melbourne
Vera Mackie, University of Wollongong
Kama Maclean, University of New South Wales
Laikwan Pang, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Gary Rawnsley, Aberystwyth University
Ming-yeh Rawnsley, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of
London
Jo Tacchi, Lancaster University
Adrian Vickers, University of Sydney
Jing Wang, MIT
Ying Zhu, City University of New York
The aim of this series is to publish original, high-quality work by both new
and established scholars in the West and the East, on all aspects of media,
culture and social change in Asia.
18 Cultural Policy in South Korea
Making a New Patron State
Hye-Kyung Lee
19 Television in Post-Reform Vietnam
Nation, Media, Market
Giang Nguyen-Thu
For a full list of available titles please visit: https://www.routledge.com/
Media-Culture-and-Social-Change-in-Asia-Series/book-series/SE0797
Television in Post-Reform
Vietnam
Nation, Media, Market
Giang Nguyen-Thu
First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2019 Giang Nguyen-Thu
The right of Giang Nguyen-Thu to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Nguyen-Thu, Giang, 1982– author.
Title: Television in post-reform Vietnam: nation, media,
market / Giang Nguyen-Thu.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2019. |
Series: Media, culture and social change in Asia; 59 |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018029462 | ISBN 9781138069022 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781315157382 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Television programs—Vietnam—History and
criticism. | Television and state—Vietnam.
Classification: LCC PN1992.3.V5 N48 2019 | DDC 791.4509597—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018029462
ISBN: 978-1-138-06902-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-15738-2 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by codeMantra
For Mom, Dad, Hà, Khôi, and especially for Tuấn.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
A note on diacritics and names
viii
xi
xiii
Introduction: nation, television, and cultural government
1
1
Television dramas and the return of normalcy
20
2
Nostalgia for the new oldness
42
3
From socialist moralism to market ethics
57
4
Personal wealth, national pride
78
5
Collective wound, private healing
98
Conclusion: fraternity without uniformity
References
Index
122
133
145
Preface
I am a member of the first Vietnamese generation that literally grew up with
a TV set at home. My age group, the so-called ‘8x generation’ (thế hệ 8x),
famed for its innovative spirit in Vietnam, was the first batch of post-war
babies born in the 1980s, just in time for the rapid development of the
television industry. In 1986, the newly bought JVC TV, a second-hand item
sourced from Japan, was perhaps the most valuable appliance in our tiny
apartment in Hanoi, a symbol of our improved lifestyle after a decade of
food shortage and cultural isolation. We turned the television on any time
we could (at night mainly and if there was electricity) because its visual
appeal immediately added excitement to our formerly boring evening ritual.
For many years, around the dining table, my parents took every opportunity to relate to us stories of their past, many of which were inspired by
the content on the small screen. One story led to another: Half-forgotten
­memories re-elaborated, sorrowful tragedies brightened up by joyful d
­ etails,
­bitter disappointment mixed with delightful nostalgia. With television as
our backdrop, I learned about my parents and my grandparents’ survival
journeys, blended with various collective milestones: The devastating famine in the mid-1940s, several wars, waves of political migration, and decades
of destitution. I had never witnessed most of these events myself, but somehow they still formed a part of my personal memory through my intimate
connection with my parents. In this way, television stimulated dialogues
that connected me with the older generations, guiding my appreciation of
my family’s private biographies as already infused with the national history.
But the daily ritual of gathering in front of a TV set also exposed a mismatch among our family members. My parents, who had been born in
the 1940s, loved to repeat heart-rending memories of warfare and hunger,
whereas I and my two older brothers often built our conversations on more
entertaining and contemporary topics: A fancy cartoon in the late 1980s,
a game show for youth in the 1990s, and the ongoing glamour and scandal
from numerous celebrity-endorsed reality shows in the 2000s. Our dining table hosted many avid debates between parents and children, with each side
holding opposite views on what was considered proper and useful on television. Stories on television also invited us to share our different opinions
Preface
ix
on numerous topics, ranging from macro issues, such as communist politics
and education policies, to banal matters, like food safety, cosmetic surgery,
and celebrity gossip. For decades, television served as an important stimulant for our conversations at home, setting the subject matter upon which we
built our talks, whether in dissent or agreement.
When I started working as a media researcher at the Vietnam National
University in 2005, I became increasingly curious about the work of
television upon post-Reform ordinary living, particularly about the way
television facilitated the relationship between personal and collective
identification. I noticed that my parents’ generation had spent a major part
of their lives under the direct influence of socialist nationalism, but they
had never had a TV set in their early years. On the other hand, my peers
and I had experienced television as our primary source of information and
pleasure since our childhoods, but we had also witnessed the waning of
socialist ideals with the pervasive pace of marketization and globalization.
Television was indeed one of the key things that marked the difference
between the pre-­Reform and post-Reform eras.
In hindsight, I also realized that many of the debates I had with my
parents around our dining table were intrinsically conditioned by our
­d ifferences in appropriating the national past and anticipating the
­national future. For better or worse, I inherited my parents’ identification
of being ‘Vietnamese’. The nation used to guide the way my parents spent
their youth under socialist warfare, and the nation continued to be a ­major
topic in our post-Reform dialogues. But my way of relating to the nation
diverged greatly from that of my parents. Whereas my father was obsessed
with the loss of a socialist utopia (in an ambivalent mixture of regret and
anger), I often found myself busy grasping new opportunities offered by the
­Reform: Learning English, enjoying pop music, watching a Korean drama,
or applying for an oversea scholarship. When extreme political turbulence
was no longer the main feature of contemporary life in ­Vietnam, my
‘­Vietnameseness’ was accumulated more through cultural practices than
through the political heroism that was my parents’ experience. I s­ uspected
that the media, particularly television, should play a ­significant role in
reflecting and negotiating such difference between the two generations.
I am urged to conduct research in response to my ­curiosity about how
television enabled the reimagination of the nation in the post-Reform era.
Such inquiry should be fruitful because the c­ ombination of television and
the nation cut across post-Reform life in ways that could reveal important
changes enabled by the entanglements of old values and new technologies
in contemporary Vietnam.
When I started reading existing literature on Vietnamese media, I had
a bizarre feeling of being alienated from my own experience as part of an
ordinary media audience. I realized that local and daily interactions with the
media were almost completely neglected. In both academic and journalistic
discourses, stories about Vietnamese media were mainly centred on
x Preface
the criticism of ideological censorship under socialist and late-socialist
politics. The role of the media in regulating banal living, like the way
television stimulated daily discussions in our family, was reduced to an
insignificant topic under the shadow of an authoritarian regime. Existing
literature often depicted dire images of Vietnamese media practitioners
struggling to maintain a balance between parroting the party state or
being put in jail and viewers (if they were ever mentioned) being passive
receivers of state-­controlled propaganda. I found this perception to be
rather simplistic, a kind of half-truth that refused to take into account how
post-Reform media production and consumption had extended beyond the
boundary of political instrumentalism. I realized that it would be vital to
suspend stereotypical presumptions in order to investigate the complexity of
the local media landscape in Vietnam. In saying this, I had no intention of
erasing the question of top-down violence; rather, I wanted to problematize
the concept of state power itself, which so far had been largely taken for
granted in relation to Vietnamese media practices. I was curious about
the way in which novel and banal media practices coexisted, unsettled,
and negotiated with the legacy of socialist censorship. The results of such
negotiation, I believed, would add much more interesting and unpredictable
nuances to the oft-repeated story of top-down oppression.
My wish to tell local stories posed its own risk. Too much personal
attachment to the local context might prevent me from maintaining a critical
distance in relation to the research object. I constantly warned myself
about the danger of overly celebrating grass-roots agency and bottom-up
resistance. Such a move would only further essentialize the dichotomy
between the oppressed and the oppressor, thus reinforcing the cliché about
top-down instrumentalism that I wanted to resist. The deeper I went into my
fieldwork, the better I saw how networks of power relations that regulated
media practices in Vietnam not only took the two directions of ‘up’ or ‘down’.
Power relations more often took a crooked and mercurial trajectory, and, in
conjunction with other forces, led to a contingent and situated field of power
with changing outcomes. New forces of marketization and globalization
enabled unsettled effects that fluctuated between escaping old norms of
socialist oppression and advancing new forms of capitalist subjugation.
In the name of the nation, the boundary between the oppressed and the
oppressor became highly undetectable. On the one hand, I was prompted by
my local experience to trace the post-Reform dynamics of television as part
of daily pleasure and to acknowledge the capacity of television to engender
positive social and cultural changes. On the other hand, I was aware of the
need to maintain critical room to reflect upon new forms of exploitation
that were no longer centred on the old model of socialist politics. This book
thus embraces my local experience as a keen viewer of Vietnamese television
since 1986 and precisely thanks to my personal history that I am motivated
to turn my everyday life into a site of critical investigation.
Acknowledgements
This book, in large part, is the result of my work at the School of Communication and Arts, University of Queensland, where I received great support
from the faculty, friends, and staff. I wish to express my profound gratitude
to Maureen Burns for her intellectual inspiration and thoughtful mentorship. Maureen’s academic generosity and emotional encouragement were of
enormous value when I proceeded through different stages of this project.
I also benefited greatly from stimulating conversations with David Carter,
whose wisdom and humour aided me greatly in maintaining my intellectual
energy. I thank Gay Hawkins for inviting me to many enlightening events
organized by the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland and for the theoretical inspiration of her works. I thank
­Angela Tuohy for her effective support on all bureaucratic matters related
to this project.
Catherine Lawrence has been the most wonderful friend I could ever wish
for in a foreign land. I appreciate her spending time with me over a cup of
coffee, talking about our families, our works, and our dreams. I thank her
for her careful reading of many of my chapters and her charming gifts for
my little daughter each time we met.
I thank Ien Ang and Kim Huynh for their precious comments on an earlier draft of the book.
My thanks also to Nguyễn Như Huy, a special friend in Vietnam who
encouraged me to embark on an academic career. Only through our endless
discussion about Vietnamese society could I formulate the very first ideas
of this project. Huy reminded me that the task of an academic person is to
raise a local voice in ways that can build a bridge between Vietnam and the
world.
My sincere gratitude is due to the interviewees who participated in this
study and allowed me to use their real names: Mã Diệu Cương, Nguyễn
Danh Dũng, Đỗ Thanh Hải, Đỗ Minh Hoàng, Nguyễn Khải Hưng, Bùi Thị
Lan Hương, Tạ Bích Loan, Nguyễn Hương Ly, Trần Ngọc Minh, Nguyễn
Hồng Nga, Phạm Thanh Phong, Tạ Minh Phương, Bùi Thu Thủy, Nguyễn
Phạm Thu Uyên, Trịnh Long Vũ, Nguyễn Thành Vũ, and Nguyễn Thu Yến.
All of my interviewees are busy television producers, so I truly appreciate
xii
Acknowledgements
their participation. I thank Bùi Thu Thủy, Nguyễn Thu Yến, Tạ Bích Loan,
and Bùi Thị Lan Hương for their efforts to help me connect with many producer interviewees and for their help that allowed me to access the archive
of Vietnam Television.
I owe special thanks to my teachers, colleagues, and friends at the
­University of Social Sciences and Humanities (Vietnam National ­University,
Hanoi), particularly those at the Faculty of Journalism and C
­ ommunication,
for their encouragement and support during my studying and working
there. I am also indebted to numerous friends, colleagues, and family members in Vietnam who have kindly tolerated my unusual curiosity about their
­television experience.
I thank the Shephard family for their wonderful hospitality and love.
­Particularly, I thank Russell Shephard and Karen Shephard for being my
most needed family in Australia.
All my love and gratitude is to Tuấn, my precious life partner. His care,
calmness, and maturity eased so much stress during my academic journey.
I thank him, deeply, for always supporting my intellectual work, much of
which is inspired by the everyday life that we share. I thank my daughter Hà,
who patiently waited for me every night to finish my work before I turned to
her for reading and chatting. I thank Khôi, my newborn son, for bringing
so much joy and hope during the final stage of the book. I thank my father
and my mother-in-law for their love. I thank my mother, who passed away
in the very first week of this project, for her unconditional support of all the
choices I made, particularly the choice to be a scholar. I thank this book, a
mourning project, for its therapeutic power, which has allowed me to reconcile with the almost unbearable reality of losing my mother.
This study is fully funded by the Australia Awards Scholarship. I thank the
Australian Government for its generosity and support throughout the project.
I thank Stephanie Donald and Peter Sowden for their editorial support.
Much of Chapter 2 first appeared in Media International Australia and is
reprinted with the permission of SAGE Publications (Nguyen-Thu, G. 2014,
‘Nostalgia for the new oldness: Vietnamese television dramas and national belonging’, Media International Australia, vol. 153, pp. 64–72. Copyright © 2014
Giang-Nguyen Thu http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1329878X1415300108#articlePermissionsContainer). An earlier version of Chapter 4
first appeared in the edited volume Commercial ­Nationalism: Selling the
Nation and Nationalizing the Sell by Palgrave ­Macmillan and is reprinted
here with permission of Springer Nature (Nguyen-Thu, G. 2015, ‘Personal
wealth, national pride: Vietnamese television and commercial nationalism’,
In Z. Volcic & M. Andrejevic (eds), Commercial Nationalism: Selling the nation and nationalizing the sell, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, pp. 86–105).
A note on diacritics and names
Vietnamese words have vastly different meanings and sometimes are unpronounceable without diacritical marks. I thus include the original diacritical
marks when I refer to Vietnamese names and texts. There are some exceptions with popular terms widely known outside Vietnam, such as Vietnam,
Ho Chi Minh, Viet Cong, Hanoi, Saigon, Hue, and Da Nang. These exceptions are for practical purposes to reduce confusion for readers who are
unfamiliar with the Vietnamese language.
I refer to my Vietnamese interviewees and those appearing on V
­ ietnamese
television by their first name instead of their surname because this is how
we properly identify people in Vietnam. In television shows or d
­ ramas,
the surnames of participants and characters are normally unknown. Non-­
Vietnamese people are all referred to by their surnames, following the
­Western norm. Names of television programmes are all translated into
­English after the first reference to their original Vietnamese names.
Introduction
Nation, television, and cultural
government
In the Western world, television has long served as the key medium used to
perpetuate the imagining of Vietnam as a war-torn nation under communist
leadership. What America refers to as the ‘Vietnam War’ was the first ‘televized war’, haunting numerous living rooms in the West many years before
and after the 1975 fall of Saigon. The effects of television were c­ ombined
and amplified by a large number of Hollywood films on the topic. The consequence, as Lawrence (2004, p. 919) stresses, is that the word ‘Vietnam’ is
‘usually affixed to pejorative words like “war”, “debacle” or “syndrome”’.
In the international world, television has propagated an understanding of
Vietnam as little more than the twin spectres of warfare and communist
dictatorship.
In 1995, 20 years after the end of the Second Indochina War, W
­ arren
Christopher (1995), the former US Secretary of State, ushered in the
­re-­establishment of United States–Vietnam diplomatic relations by announcing that ‘we look on Vietnam as a country, not a war’. After this debut,
the redefinition of ‘Vietnam as a country, not a war’ became a well-known
­saying in international discourse to introduce the new face of Vietnam. This
pronouncement is mostly made by and for non-Vietnamese, typically war
­veterans, diplomats, and tourists. Emphasizing that Vietnam is ‘a country,
not a war’ may be a way for speakers to reflect their struggle to leave behind
the abject image of Vietnam and to hint at the prospect of reconciliation and
prosperity under a civil future. The irony is that the declamatory redefinition of a nation as being ‘not a war’ only reconfirms what the speaker seeks
to forget. Even in its absence, warfare continues to serve as a defining factor
in Western perceptions of Vietnam.
In contrast to the international imagining of Vietnam, the declaration of
‘a country, not a war’ is redundant in Vietnam, particularly among ordinary
Vietnamese. For these people, the everyday presence of peace is already an
obvious celebration of the absence of war. When there is no constant threat
of gunfire or political turbulence, banal living begins to emerge as an extensive and uncertain space for national formation. This new realm of ordinary
living complicates existing political definitions of Vietnam, demanding a
2 Nation, TV, and cultural government
re-examination of the concept of Vietnam as something that might be much
more curious and exciting than merely being ‘not a war’.
This book responds to such a demand by relocating the concept of
­Vietnam in the space of everyday practice shaped by the post-Reform context of marketization and globalization. The entry point of this inquiry is
television, established in Vietnam as a genuinely mass medium only in the
early 1990s. Interestingly, while television in the West (predominantly in
the United States) affixed notions of warfare and political violence to the
imagining of Vietnam, television in mainland Vietnam only proliferated
with the restoration of peace and market liberation. Before 1986, ­television
was mainly restricted to news and current affairs, with extremely limited
broadcast hours. After 1986, television rapidly permeated Vietnamese
homes, with a high level of popularity coinciding with greater availability,
­increasingly diverse content, and escalating hours of transmission. Popular
genres such as drama, the game show, the talk show, and the reality show
soon became the most important and well-received component of televised
content. The extensive development of popular television is indeed one of
­ istinctive cultural achievements of the post-Reform era. Just as
the most d
1970s Western television was a place to understand the notion of Vietnam as
a Cold War battlefield, Vietnamese television after the 1990s is an ideal site
to explore the idea of Vietnam in the new era of peace and global integration.
Everyday nationhood: Beyond the politicized image of Vietnam
In 1882, Renan (1990, p. 19) posed the question ‘What is a nation?’, a­ nswering
that a nation is less a predestined entity and more a ‘spiritual principle’
based on collective memory and amnesia. As Renan (1990, p. 20) asserts,
nations ‘are not something eternal’ because ‘they had a beginning and they
will end’. In stressing that a nation is historically formed by collective labour
instead of being a primordial and transcendent reality, Renan’s classic essay
sets the fundamental framework for the study of nation and nationalism.
A century after Renan’s first inquiry, there was a renewal of interest in
the question of nationhood, with the burgeoning of critical works on the
topic. In the 1980s and 1990s, the scholarship on nationalism saw ­multiple
debates over the defining features of ‘a nation’, questioning whether a nation is premodern or modern, objective or subjective, political or cultural,
radical or banal, secular or spiritual. As more researchers engaged in these
debates, it became evident that these binary structures served more as
analytical frameworks, based on idealized contradictions, than as actual
­oppositions. While the nation is fundamentally a modern phenomenon
(Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm 1992b; Anderson 2006), its historical formation
always involved the recombination of premodern forms of ethnicity (Smith
1986; Guibernau Montserrat & Hutchinson 2004; Hutchinson 2004). The
nation appears as an objective fact to the citizenry, something as natural
as ‘having a nose and two ears’ (Gellner 1983, p. 6), but such a naturalized
Nation, TV, and cultural government
3
truth is always the work of imagination and invention (Hobsbawm 1992a;
Anderson 2006). ­Nationalism can be understood as ‘primarily a political
principle’ (Gellner 1983, p. 1), mainly referring to ‘political movements
seeking or exercising state power’ (Breuilly 1993, p. 2), but the nation only
achieves political c­ ontrol over its subjects once it is banally embedded in
everyday practice ­(Billig 1995). In Europe, the nation first became possible
due to the ­secularizing imagination of ‘empty, homogenous time’ ­(Anderson
2006, p. 26); however, for many colonial subjects, the nation is always
­spiritually possessed (Chatterjee 1993). The nation, to borrow the words of
Nairn (1975), is ‘a modern Janus’ that employs multiple faces and is inherently self-contradictory in its modes of existence.
These debates significantly inform the study of Vietnamese nationalism,
particularly on the questions of modernity and politics. Vu (2007) traces
the scholarship from the 1960s onwards, demonstrating how nation and
nationalism have been the primary topic in the field of Vietnamese studies. In many early studies, particularly those appearing at the peak of the
Second Indochina War, scholars on Vietnamese nationalism were radically
engaged in political matters and failed to adopt a suitable academic distance. As Vu (2007) emphasizes, it was only at the end of the Cold War that
studies of Vietnamese nationalism reached their scholarly maturity under
the ­influence of recent theories on nationalism, particularly the work of
­Benedict Anderson.
The main achievement of post-Cold War scholarship on Vietnamese nationalism is that many authors have conducted empirical studies to expose
the multiple and conflicting processes of national formation in the distinctive context of Vietnam. Zinoman (2001a) examines the role of colonial
prisons and communist prisoners in enabling spatial and ideological imagination of the modern Vietnamese nation in the era of French settlement.
Goscha (1995) explores networks of transport, newspapers, and schools to
argue that the development of Vietnamese nationalism was a byproduct of
multiple failed projects aimed at controlling the whole of Indochina, not
only Vietnam. Kelley (2005) goes back to feudal times from the sixteenth
to the nineteenth centuries to challenge the belief that modern Vietnam is
based on any inherently ‘national’ tradition. While feudal dynasties were
conscious of territorial borders with China, these dynasties mainly identified themselves as belonging to Chinese culture rather than embracing their
own cultural identity. Pelley (2002) shifts the focus to the 1960s, when the
new socialist regime rewrote nationalist history. Multiple nationalist myths,
particularly those of shared ancient origin and repetitive peasant resistances
against foreign enemies, as Pelley argues (2002, pp. 140–57), were wilfully
fabricated by the party state from a wide range of historical sources to legitimate their communist leadership in the name of the nation. Ninh (2002) also
attends to the cultural dynamics of Vietnamese nationalism, examining the
uneasy struggles of Vietnamese intellectuals from 1945 to 1965 in seeking to
balance their nationalist aspirations with the socialist ideology imposed by
4 Nation, TV, and cultural government
the party state. As Vu (2007, p. 211) concludes, these recent studies avoid
essentialist assumptions about the birth and development of Vietnamese
nationalism, demonstrating ‘the nation as a social construct and cultural
artifact’ while modifying existing theories of nationalism by adapting them
to the particular case of Vietnam.
Recent studies of Vietnamese nationalism establish the historical background for this book, particularly in identifying the deep-seated n
­ ationalist
legacies upon which the post-Reform nationalist discourse is built. But this
book also responds to a problem of existing scholarship on Vietnamese
nationalism, that is, the overt attention paid to the political nature of the
­nation. This politicizing tendency typically focusses on the role of communist
­
revolutionaries, the impact of other political actors in the colonial ­period, and
the centralized power of the party state in the postcolonial era. Such a heavy
focus on politics is legitimate, particularly as there has been considerable political violence in the name of Vietnam and as one-party rule ­persists. ­However,
the overemphasis on political struggles, especially on state power, led to the
neglect of the cultural and ordinary dimensions of national formation, which
always exists alongside the political sphere and has a potent role in sustaining
and transforming the individual and collective senses of nationhood.
This politicizing tendency leads to a theoretical impasse in the study of
national formation in contemporary Vietnam, now that political power has
become much less concentrated than it was before. The party state no longer
works as the only locus of power and increasingly operates through heterogeneous and contingent assemblages of discourses, technologies, social
practices, administrative logics, and political procedures, which are neither
inherently unified nor always powerful. This theoretical impasse is evident
in the lack of interest in the problem of cultural nationhood in post-Reform
Vietnam, although there are a wide range of works published about the birth
and historical vicissitudes of Vietnamese nationalism. The sole focus on the
party state’s power normally fails to reveal any major new findings, merely
reinforcing views that the party state persistently maintains the intention
of controlling the production of national myths. For example, Gillen (2011)
argues that there has been no significant change in the state’s cultural ­policy
after the reform. Salomon and Vu (2007) also confirm the party state’s ideological inertia when stressing that history lessons in Vietnamese schools
still preserve all the main features of the socialist nationalism. These studies reveal the conservatism of the state system in the post-Reform era. In
my view, though, such conservatism not only indicates the persistence of
socialist politics but, more importantly, highlights the practical weakness
of the party state in seeking to expand its governing capacity over the vast
changes occurring in all aspects of post-Reform life. The failure of the party
state to transform its mode of cultural governance does not indicate that
changes are not happening elsewhere, outside the elite zone of state politics.
The sphere of cultural and social transformation beyond direct control from
above is precisely the space for the national formation targeted in this book.
Nation, TV, and cultural government
5
It is perhaps important to ask whether nationalism, state-centric or not, is
still a useful concept in understanding Vietnamese society, present or past.
Some scholars say ‘no’. McHale (2008), in a vivid study of the colonial a­ rchives
in Vietnam, suggests that too much focus on nationalism fails to explain how
ordinary Vietnamese people experienced daily life during colonial times.
McHale (2008) demonstrates that, in the early twentieth century, ordinary
Vietnamese people were engaged with penny literature and popular ­religious
activities rather than burdening themselves with communist ideology or nationalist revolution, as is often suggested by studies of Vietnamese colonial
politics. Taylor (2001) also challenges the homogenous, linear, and top-down
perspective of the modern Vietnamese nation. As Taylor (2001, p. 22) argues,
writing about multiple realities of modernity in Vietnam, ‘the ontological
category of time is not the preserve of the social scientist, nor the national
leader, but is constantly up for grabs in the negotiation of existence’. In the
Southern land in the early 1990s, as Taylor observed, life was bursting beyond the restricted zone of socialist culture. Local people found their own
ways to enjoy daily pleasure, in mundane activities such as singing sentimental songs in an impromptu karaoke competition or watching smuggled tapes
of Western and diasporic music (2001, p. 24). Taylor thus proposes that we
focus on the richness and ambivalence of local and regional life instead of
relying on static narratives about the Vietnamese nation. In so doing, Taylor
investigates contesting ideas of the modern Vietnam without having to think
through the concepts of ‘nation’ or ‘nationalism’ at all.
Still, McHale (2008) suggests walking away from the concept of the nation
only because, in arguing that modernity in Vietnam should not be equated
with nationalist communism, he also assumes that nationalism equates with
radicalism and revolution. McHale’s assumption is evident in the statement
that ‘[W]hen one examines what Vietnamese published and read between
1920–1945, it becomes clear that Vietnamese thought about far more than
revolution and the nation. Morality tracts and lowbrow fiction circulated
far more than revolutionary writings’ (2008, p. 7). Here, ‘nation’ is naturally
paired with ‘revolution’ and consequently is seen as inherently contradictory to banal interests, such as those of ‘moral tracts and lowbrow fiction’.
The mutually exclusive pairing of nationalism and ordinariness suspends
the analysis of how the ‘nation’ might also be immersed in penny literature
and mass religion. In moving beyond the politicized nation, McHale risks
rejecting the nation as a whole.
I am much inspired by the approach of McHale and Taylor, especially
their focus on ordinary people and the complexity of everyday politics.
But I suggest moving beyond the politicized nation without abandoning
the question of nationhood, thus avoiding the risk of throwing the baby
out with the bathwater. I assert that the concept of ‘nation’ is still useful
in understanding contemporary ways of living in Vietnam, providing that
the concept is no longer limited to the political and radical features that
have become clichés about Vietnamese nationalism. This is necessarily
6 Nation, TV, and cultural government
a methodological suggestion, seeking to widen the scope of national formation so that it can tolerate a more diverse set of practices than merely
that of political antagonism. Neither detouring from the much-discussed
concept of Vietnamese nationalism nor taking it for granted, this book
seeks to unpack the persistent influence of nationalism in post-Reform
Vietnam by investigating the contingency and necessity that make such
persistence possible.
Consider, for example, the recent rise of popular nationalist sentiments,
centred on the dispute over the Spratly and Paracel Islands, which reminds
us that nationalism stays solid in post-Reform times. Many patriotic activities regarding the Vietnamese territorial claim over these islands are now
happening outside, if not explicitly against, the direct manipulation of the
party state. Such a fact contradicts the lasting assumption that Vietnamese nationalism is heavily manipulated by top-down politics. Nationalist
practices in Vietnam also exceeded the binary frame of state/anti-state
politics. In many cases, being nationalist has very little connection with
the sphere of political struggles. In 2013, a ten-minute YouTube clip made
in a flashy graphic style by a young student in Ho Chi Minh City attracted
200,000 hits in just three days by proudly and ‘coolly’ presenting a nationalist history of Vietnam, arousing patriotic excitement among teenagers
who had been born long after the war (Minh 2013; Phong 2013). Abundant
nationalist appeals are now found in tabloid media, on topics with few
obvious political connections, such as beauty contests, celebrity fashion,
online gaming, and even the glamorous franchised television programme
Vietnam Idol (for example Hạ 2014; Lan 2014; Phạm 2014; Quốc 2014).
Decades after the wars, Vietnamese people, young and old, continue to
hold on to the idea of the nation as a meaningful form of collective membership that allows them to navigate between the burden of the past and
the promise of the future.
These scattered ‘outbreaks’ of nationalism do not emerge from a vacuum.
As Billig (1995, p. 46) argues, nationalism is not something waiting to be
awakened or that simply ‘comes and goes’. National reproduction is always
latent in the unnoticed way of everyday living from which outbursts emerge.
Billig introduces the influential term ‘banal nationalism’, emphasizing the
ordinariness of nation-making. Hobsbawm (1992b, p. 11) also stresses that
national formation is always rooted in everydayness; he asserts that ‘official
ideologies of states and movements are not guides to what it is in the minds
of even the most loyal citizens or supporters’. Billig and Hobsbawm’s frameworks of banal nationalism or everyday nationhood reveal the complexity of
national identification in both radical practices and the virtually unnoticeable continuity of ordinary living, emphasizing how the pedestrian quality of
everyday life is indispensable for a few moments of radical eruption. A focus
on banality thus implies no opposition between the radical and the diurnal
dimensions of nationhood, and instead confirms the inherent connections
between its extraordinary and ordinary features.
Nation, TV, and cultural government
7
Television and the nation: Questioning the prohibition model
Ordinary nationhood is where television enters this inquiry. I examine
post-Reform television as an important site of everyday politics, where
the idea of nationhood is banally perpetuated, mutated, and reinforced.
­Regarding post-Reform television, once again I need to defend my curiosity against the politicizing approach that has long occupied debates about
­Vietnamese media, something similar to the problem of Vietnamese nationalism studies. This politicizing approach focusses mainly on the question of
state power and censorship, and largely ignores how the media, particularly
television, in Vietnam have thoroughly pervaded ordinary ways of living
outside the political sphere. For years, the World Press Freedom Index has
ranked ­Vietnam among the ‘least free’ countries for media (Reporter Without Borders 2016). In this ranking system, press freedom in Vietnam causes
persistent alarm as Vietnamese leaders are described as continuing to
‘tighten their grip on news and information and adapt their methods of radical censorship to the digital era’ (Reporter Without Borders 2014, para. 26).
International reports on the arrests of anti-state journalists, bloggers, and
protestors further reinforce the grim vision of media freedom in Vietnam.
A sole focus on political censorship gives the impression that media practices in Vietnam are all about the antagonism between the party state and
dissidents, hinting that, despite a long period of market reform, the media
system remains structurally unchanged from the pre-Reform model of socialist propaganda.
In academic discourse, studies of recent developments in Vietnamese media are surprisingly rare. Among the few available studies, the media are
also defined mainly in terms of their relationship with the party state. Heng
(1999), for example, describes Vietnamese media as being ‘of the state, for the
state, yet against the state’. McKinley (2007, p. 26) also poses the question,
‘Can a state-owned media effectively monitor corruption?’ answering that
Vietnamese media are ‘becoming increasingly assertive’ while still navigating within ‘boundaries set and monitored by the state’. Cain (2014) ­examines
the media as selecting between the options of being ‘for’ or ‘against’ the
party state, stressing how fluctuations between the state’s ambition to reduce corruption and the need to maintain political prestige have led to uncertainties in the censorship system, permitting a half-free, half-repressive
model of media governance in the post-Reform era. Hayton (2010, p. 166)
asserts that Vietnamese journalists already had ‘a sniff of freedom’, meaning that they have been perceptive enough to absorb the more advanced
standards of the liberal-democratic West, but the question of whether such
‘sniffing’ could turn into systemic practices of political reform remained
unclear. The common finding among recent studies is that the Vietnamese
media strive to escape top-down limitations and that they have partly succeeded in doing so. Nevertheless, they have consistently failed to achieve
‘full’ freedom because the party state can impose strict censorship at any
8 Nation, TV, and cultural government
time if a political threat from public critique is sensed. The quest for media
freedom in Vietnam is thus always a half-success, depending on the political
mood of the soft-authoritarian regime.
While I do not refute the conclusions of these discourses, I question their
reductionist assumptions about the effects of Vietnamese media (and the
hidden assumption of the readily available ‘media freedom’ in the West,
a model that Vietnamese media need to follow but never quite get close
to). Both journalistic and academic discourses are based on what Kuhn
(1988, p. 2) terms ‘the prohibition model’, in which power of the media is
­understood as concentrated in the hands of certain actors/institutions and
is restricted to the juridical act of selective approval, exclusion, and punishment. This approach consequently treats media practices as mainly defined
by relationships with legal organizations whose laws are followed, resisted,
or (ambivalently) both followed and resisted. The key research question is
who possesses power rather than how the actors involved, including both
the state and the media, are themselves the effects instead of the source of
power. As a result, studies of media practices are mainly about the binary
story of either obedience or rebellion. In the words of Kuhn (1988, p. 4)
when exploring the practice of cinema censorship in Britain, the prohibition
model ‘allows only one story, and not necessarily the most interesting or
important one, to be told’.
In challenging the prohibition model, I by no means reject the manipulative intention embedded in laws and policing systems imposed by state
institutions in Vietnam. I argue alternatively that such juridical practices indicate only one among many forms of media management and thus ­cannot
represent the complex, uncertain, and changing effects of post-Reform
­media. The prohibitive assumption of state power leads easily to the neglect
of the way in which media practices have long extended beyond the zone of
state-centric politics and how involved actors are emerging with the unfolding of power relations rather existing prior to power. Many media practices
after the reform, typically those on popular entertainment and mundane interests, might be too pedestrian to be included in the arena occupied by state
institutions and activist dissidents, but such media practices offer insights
into wider and deeper effects on the way ordinary Vietnamese people govern
and make sense of their own lives. These practices are certainly constrained
within the boundaries set by the policing system, but the restriction based
on political taboos leaves a significant space for the emergence of new dis­ ssumptions
courses that appear politically unthreatening to state power. A
about restricted freedom thus cannot be applied equally to different types
of media practice in Vietnam.
In a recent study of the style of state governance in Vietnam, MacLean
(2013) convincingly demonstrates that the Vietnamese state has never
reached the status of a centralized system and has never been able to control
the actual effects of its own policies, even in the socialist era defined by political oppression and economic centralization. MacLean (2013) argues that
Nation, TV, and cultural government
9
the failure to achieve full dictatorship is unintended and is the result of the
state lacking the human, financial, and technological resources to ensure
that centralized plans can reach the grass-roots citizenry. A combination
of monopolistic intention and deficient implementation thus leads to a state
that ‘could be “strong” and “weak” in the very same geographic spaces at
the very same time’ (MacLean 2013, p. 9). So, the Vietnamese state can be
selectively repressive regarding its political sovereignty and some economic
privileges, but, at the same time, multiple levels of state governance can
­depend on the ‘profoundly disorganized assemblage of conflicting policies,
contradictory plans, and competing projects’ (MacLean 2013, p. 207). There
is consequently ‘a significant degree of flexibility’ tolerated by state power,
allowing social, economic, and cultural practices to flourish outside the direct control of centralized regulation (MacLean 2013, p. 208). MacLean’s
research confirms the possibility of a space of negotiation where Vietnamese
media can operate on their own terms and achieve their own strategic goals.
Building on MacLean’s research, my study attends specifically to the ways
in which media organizations make use of the space of ‘flexibility’ beyond
the direct intervention of the party state, which grows much larger after
the reform. In doing so, I complicate the possibilities of media power in
post-Reform Vietnam beyond the binary options of obedience and rebellion
without rejecting the existing reality of juridical restriction.
I propose, following Foucault, that we leave behind the prohibition model
to attend to the productive nature of power. I explore the media’s internal
logic of power performance, that is, the ways in which Vietnamese television
produces what Foucault (2003f, p. 138) terms ‘the possible field of action of
others’ whereby people are invited to organize and make sense of their individual and collective living by referring to the common idea of a national
community. Seen as a programme of cultural government, national formation
works less through direct acts of domination, exclusion, or punishment than
through an indirect mechanism that shapes human conduct from afar on the
basis of subject formation. Nationalist practices thus ­operate productively
instead of repressively: They produce meanings, truths, and subjectivities.
In relation to television, a nationalist practice is always situated within
specific networks of texts, contexts, and actors. As such, nationalism can
be weak or strong and can include ruptures and continuities, structures and
chaos, macros and micros, differences and similarities. That is, at the unfolding relationship with television, national formation is the work of both
normativity and creativity, aiming at the production of homogeneity in a
manner that is inherently heterogeneous, fragmented, and unpredictable.
The key question addressed in this study is thus not whether the party state
or television possesses more power in the bargaining between structural
censorship and media freedom but how television enables plural networks,
both statist and non-statist, of media genres, techniques, producers, and
viewers in ways that actualize different forms of national membership. Put
otherwise, this book does not simply assume the inevitability of nationalism
10
Nation, TV, and cultural government
but investigates the historical emergence of novel conditions upon which
the idea of shared nationhood becomes sayable, thinkable, and governable
at particular conjunctures of television, marketization, and globalization.
The case studies: Text and context
I approach the question of television and nationhood in a thematic way,
focussing on three case studies of various television programmes, each of
which demonstrates a specific blending of television and national imagi­
nation in post-Reform Vietnam. These case studies are set against a historical analysis of the birth and development of television in Vietnam since its
inception in the late 1960s, with a focus on the post-Reform burgeoning of
popular genres and programmes. In so doing, I have no ambition to provide
a comprehensive account of the interplay between television and the nation.
Rather, through detailed and intensive analysis, I investigate remarkable
instances of everyday nationhood mediated by television. Through the case
studies, I acknowledge that the idea of the ‘nation’ is neither fixed nor homogenous but always changing due to the contingent and plural enfoldment
of texts and contexts. But I also use the case studies to diagnose some of the
key trajectories of national formation in post-Reform Vietnam. My selection of the case studies thus negotiates between difference and coherence.
The chosen programmes include two dramas, Hanoian (‘Người Hà Nội’)
and The City Stories (‘Chuyện Phố Phường’); the talk show Contemporaries (‘Người Đương Thời’); and the reality show As if We Never Parted
(‘Như Chưa Hề Có Cuộc Chia Ly’), all of which are produced by Vietnam
­Television (VTV), the national network. This selection inevitably reflects
my personal experience of being an urban viewer in Hanoi. The experience
dates back to 1986, when my family was the first in our neighbourhood to
own a colour TV set, which was the result of my father’s increased income
after a brief time working in Africa. Being a media researcher, however, I
have three further justifications for my case study selection.
First, the case studies reflect the development of a broad variety of televi­
sion genres in the post-Reform period, beginning with the triumphant a­ rrival
of television dramas, then talk shows, and finally the now all-pervasive reality shows. Each selected television programme marks a specific milestone
in the development of national television in Vietnam: Hanoian was one of
the first television dramas to be made in Vietnam by Vietnamese producers;
Contemporaries is among the longest-running talk shows, lasting for over 11
years, with more than 400 interviewees; and As if We Never Parted is a rare
domestic reality show that continues to attract public attention and resists
competition from imported reality formats. These programmes demonstrate the progression of Vietnamese television from a monotonous means
of political propaganda centred on news and current affairs into a complex,
audience-oriented mechanism with diverse channels and programmes, and
a strong emphasis on popular content.
Nation, TV, and cultural government
11
Second, driven by a curiosity about everyday nationhood, I focus on television shows with popular themes or/and ordinary participants. I exclude
news and current affairs whose content is still heavily manipulated by macro
politics. News programmes on VTV usually dedicate the first and largest
part of their airing time to advocate state agendas under tight political censorship, thus having little space for creativity. On the contrary, the realm of
popular programmes enjoys much more ‘freedom’ than news. In the 1990s,
entertainment shows started arriving in Vietnam and soon outweighed news
in quantity and popularity. Aiming at pleasing the audiences instead of the
party state, popular programmes quickly became the most watched television content and a daily source of pleasure for ordinary people. In their
early years, popular programmes were made fully by in-house producers.
Today an increasing number of popular shows are outsourced to private
companies under the regulation of the market without much manipulation
from above (Hồng 2015; Lê 2015). The rapid expansion of popular television
in Vietnam coincides with the rise of entertainment genres and the decline
of news and current affairs at the global scale (Hargreaves & Thomas 2002;
Bonner 2003; Turner 2005; Thussu 2007).
The flourishing of popular television in Vietnamese, however, is generally neglected in discussions of Vietnamese media due to an overt concern
about political censorship and dissent. In choosing popular programmes
over news and current affairs, I emphasize the fact that the most fascinating
transformations of post-Reform television are happening outside or at least
not squarely located within the domain of macro politics. In deliberately
concentrating on popular programmes introduced after the reform, I target the most dynamic but also the most under-studied sector of Vietnamese
television, where the complexity of nation-making can be revealed beyond
lasting political clichés.
Third, among a large pool of non-news programmes in Vietnam after
1986, I narrow my investigation to prominent programmes written and produced domestically. In so doing, I exclude imported programmes (which
often achieve the highest ratings, as in the cases of many franchised reality
shows) to focus on domestic cultural production. The soap operas Hanoian
and The City Stories, the talk show Contemporaries, and the reality show
As if We Never Parted all use local stories to achieve popularity and success. My selection thus prioritizes the role of local agents in adopting new
media genres to tell their own stories on their own terms. In choosing what
I describe as the in-between programmes, that is, programmes that are neither extremely propagandist nor purely commercial, I aim to unpack the
remaking of nationhood that flows between the control of the state, market
impulses, and local experiences of producers and viewers.
My choice of the programmes has its limit: I mainly deal with programmes produced and broadcast by the national network, that is, VTV.
Although considered ‘national’, VTV is heavily associated with Northern
production teams and claims more popularity in the Northern and Central
12
Nation, TV, and cultural government
parts of Vietnam. In the South, the television industry inherited a rich legacy from the previous American broadcasting system and thus maintains a
very strong provincial network that outweighs the popularity of VTV. Still,
after the Reform, Southern television has more or less followed the same
trajectory as the national network, growing from a rare cultural activity in
the 1980s into an inherent part of the everyday fabric in the 1990s and 2000s,
with a strong focus on popular content. So, while I acknowledge my neglect
of regional variations, my study of the national network can serve as a useful reference for readers who seek to understand the general development
of contemporary Vietnamese television. My geographical limit, I hope, is
not necessarily a limitation as it allows me to take advantage of my long
engagement with television in the North. The partial nature of this research
invites further studies of the complex media landscape of Vietnam, which so
far receives little academic attention.
Setting the scene of the Vietnamese television industry
An overview of the television landscape in Vietnam is necessary to set the
background for this book, particularly at a time when there is a complete
absence of literature on the Vietnamese television industry. This rather
sketchy report attends mainly to administrative issues, censorship procedures, and commercial settings. More analysis on the historical vicissitudes
of Vietnamese television is provided in Chapters 1 and 3, with a focus on
genres and content.
In Vietnam, all broadcasting entities are state institutions by law, meaning that there is strictly no private ownership of television. After the merger
of the Northern and Southern media systems in 1975, the broadcasting services were vertically structured into national and provincial networks. The
national system, VTV, operates as a ministerial-level agency and currently
runs nine free-to-air channels, including one for an international audience
and one for ethnic minorities. All provinces have their own television networks under the monitor of the provincial government, resulting in 64 local
stations across the country. There are also newly registered ­broadcasters that
do not belong to the traditional vertical structure. VTC (Vietnam Television
Corporation), for example, was the first television network belonging to a
state-owned enterprise; it was licenced in 2004 and aimed primarily at profit
making. At a time when analogue television was still a norm, the d
­ igital
terrestrial service provided by VTC quickly achieved financial success by
selling digital receivers with accompanied copyrighted sports programmes
and entertainment shows. In the 2010s, when the television industry suffered from harsher competition with more pay service options, VTC lost its
momentum and was transformed into a network ­under the management of
Voice of Vietnam (VOV), the national radio system. Newly licenced television networks, particularly paid content providers, have significantly complicated the television landscape in Vietnam, creating an intense sense of
Nation, TV, and cultural government
13
rivalry and attracting more business-minded players into the broadcasting
game. Overall, Vietnamese television has tremendously transformed within
a few decades. In 1990, Vietnam had only one national channel, some provincial networks in major cities, and no pay television. In 2017, there were
104 free-to-air channels at the national, regional, and provincial levels; 91
channels produced exclusively for pay services; and 55 licenced international channels (Hiền 2017).
The broadcasting system is governed by two main regulatory bodies: The
Department of Radio, Television, and Electronic Information (Cục Phát
Thanh, Truyền Hình và Thông Tin Điện Tử), and the Central Propaganda
and Education Commission (Ban Tuyên Giáo Trung Ương). The Department
of Radio, Television, and Electronic Information was newly formed in 2008
as an executive unit under the Ministry of Information and Communication,
mainly regulating the legal, technical, and economic aspects of the broadcasting and digital industries. One of this institution’s key responsibilities
is licencing new broadcasters, television channels, online games, and digital content services. The Department of Radio, Television, and ­Electronic
Information also sets general requirements for production, oversees commercial services, monitors infrastructure investment, and performs punitive
measures against common violation of media law. The establishment of the
Department of Radio, Television, and Electronic Information in 2008 was
the state’s response to the rocket expansion of the television industry, the
burgeoning of online games, and the arrival of new digital platforms, such
as YouTube and Facebook in the 2000s. Before 2008, all Vietnamese media,
including prints, television, radio, and the Internet, were monitored by the
Department of the Press (Cục Báo Chí), a long-established unit traditionally
supervising only print media.
Whereas the Department of Radio, Television, and Electronic I­ nformation
focusses more on technical matters, the Central Propaganda and Education
Commission deals exclusively with ideological gatekeeping. Operating directly under the Communist Party, the Central Propaganda and Education
Commission is the top media censor in Vietnam, working hard to ensure
that, despite extensive changes in media technology and economy, media
practitioners remain loyal to the party’s propagandist agenda. Although censorship, by nature, operates in secrecy, there is at least one publicly known
censoring mechanism in Vietnam: The weekly and compulsory meetings in
Hanoi between the Central Propaganda and Education Commission and
leaders/representatives of all media institutions. At the local level, similar
meetings are organized by provincial Propaganda and Education Commissions to monitor local media. In the Hanoi-based meetings, media leaders
are provided with a review of the previous week and are informed about
what should and should not be published in the coming week. For sensitive
or controversial topics, there will be specific guidance on what angles and
narratives to focus on. Understandably, television is the most easily censored medium because it operates through centralized management with
14 Nation, TV, and cultural government
multiple content filters. So, whereas some Vietnamese newspapers occasionally take the risk of punishment to reach beyond the censorship limits
imposed from above, Vietnamese television is significantly controlled, with
almost no space for a critical voice. Television producers are not only controlled by layers of gatekeepers before the final airing of their programmes,
but they also master the art of self-censorship. The result is that all political
programmes, such as news, current affairs, and documentaries, are strictly
aligned with the top-down agenda. Television coverage of controversial
­issues, if any, mainly aims at stabilizing rather than stirring social debates.
Strict political control, however, does not prevent television producers
from making all kinds of entertainment shows without much restraint.
In other words, a defining characteristic of contemporary Vietnamese
­television is the raw combination of political surveillance and entertainment liberty. To be able to exist at all, television must adequately perform
the political duties required from above, but the state no longer provides
regular funding in return. As the television industry develops, the commercialization of entertainment emerges as a convenient solution for both
sides. Producers have the freedom to expand their team and cover the production cost themselves by selling popular content to advertisers or outsourcing ­entertainment shows to private production companies, while
the state is increasingly excused from the heavy burden of subsidizing the
broadcasting system without sacrificing its political grip. Since 2005, VTV
has become fully independent in financial terms, and television stations in
many ­cities have significantly funded themselves since more or less the same
time. Vietnamese television thus flexibly blends state-owned elements with
­commercial ones, manifesting the most intense form of late-socialist media
management: Heavy censorship combined with blatant marketization. This
model is similar to China’s but differs significantly from the public services
in other countries, such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the
Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), and the Canada Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), where broadcasters strive to promote public values
rather than the state-imposed agenda while still significantly relying on taxpayers for funding.
Commercial sponsorship is highly common on both national and provincial networks, which is most easily detected by popping logos on the
backdrops of almost all popular shows and sometimes even in news programmes. Securing a commercial sponsor is one of the key criteria to
grant permission for a new show, and rewriting the content to fit the taste
of the sponsor is also highly common. Consider, for example, the case of
Oppo, a Chinese smartphone brand that recently obtained a great expansion in Vietnam. For several years since 2015, the green logo of Oppo has
pervaded many top-rated game shows, comedy shows, and reality shows
on the national airwave, where participating celebrities are unsurprisingly
the brand’s commercial ambassadors. In 2017, Lê Bình, a senior reporter
at VTV specializing in financial news, also stirred heated debates in the
Nation, TV, and cultural government
15
journalist community by publicly declaring in an interview that she signed
three ‘consultancy contracts’ with three different commercial banks, from
which she received monthly payments not only for herself but also for her
whole team at VTV (Hiếu & Phạm 2017). While the nature of this ‘consultancy’ service was never disclosed, it is now a public secret that the media in
Vietnam rely on their relationship with businesspeople for financial incentives, either through direct sponsorship or through more concealed forms of
public relations.
Advertisement is another key source of funding for free-to-air television, and rating has consequently become the most important criteria to
determine the success of a television show. Rating data is made available to
production teams on a daily basis, silently and unsparingly pushing television workers into a never-ending race to attract more viewers. In 2016, the
­Department of Radio, Television, and Electronic Information created its
own audience measurement team to collect and sell rating data to broadcasters, meaning that the state is now directly competing with Kantar TNS,
the international market research company that has long monopolized the
audience measurement service in Vietnam.
Pay television service was first launched in 1995 but only flourished in the
late 2000s, thanks to better living standards and an extensive investment in
the cable and Internet infrastructure. Since around 2010, the pay television
industry has been growing at a rocket speed, sometimes at the rate of 100
per cent more subscribers a year (M. Q. 2015). With the market getting more
competitive, the pay television industry witnesses constant rise and fall of
new and old investors. In 2017, there were about 13 million subscribers to
pay television, meaning that half of the total 26 million Vietnamese families
now have access to pay service at home (Hiền 2017). The pay television market is mainly occupied by cable service, but Internet Protocol TV is now the
latest trend, with major telecommunication companies recently joining the
market (Đình 2017).
At a highly affordable fee of about six to ten dollars a month, a family
can enjoy about 200 domestic and international channels on premium cable services, among which there are 91 domestic channels made exclusively
for pay services, primarily dedicated to dramas, sports programmes, lifestyle, comedies, and game shows. There are also 55 international channels
licenced for pay television, including many global news channels, such as
BBC World News, CNN International, Bloomberg, and NHK World, and
popular entertainment channels, such as MTV, HBO, Star World, Cinemax,
Fox Sports, and Cartoon Network. In terms of censorship, all providers
must take full responsibility in gatekeeping their content. In the case of the
pay service provided by VTV, for instance, ‘sensitive channels’, such as BBC
World News and CNN International, are subject to ten to thirty minutes
delay for political screening. All news and features related to Vietnam are
checked beforehand to ensure no politically unwanted messages are seen on
pay television. But it seems that after the end of the ‘Vietnam War’, stories
16 Nation, TV, and cultural government
related to Vietnam rarely entered the agenda of BBC or CNN, so the two
channels are watched with extremely rare interruption. A major censored
content in 2016 was the coverage of Fidel Castro’s death. To prevent potential harm to socialist prestige, most reports and documentaries about
the Cuban revolutionary leader on BBC and CNN were omitted, leaving
the screen blank with a simple message: ‘The program is disrupted due to
inappropriate content’. The all-exciting reports of the 2016 presidential race
to the White House that happened at the same time as Castro’s death, interestingly, were broadcast fully without any interference. Entertainment
channels on pay television are also subject to cultural censorship, and most
popular programmes are shown with Vietnamese subtitles. This means that
Vietnamese viewers were enjoying Games of Thrones more or less at the same
time as American viewers but certainly with much less sex and nudity. The
coming and going of international channels on pay television in Vietnam is
most of the time a problem of financial or copyright negotiation rather than
a matter of political restriction.
In 2009, the state officially gave the green light for television stations to
collaborate with private partners in their production activities (Bộ Thông
Tin và Truyền Thông 2009). This legal move allows the state to better
regulate an already common practice in the television industry, in which
an increased number of entertainment programmes were outsourced to
external media companies. These collaborative practices are informally
referred to as the ‘socialization’ (xã hội hóa) of television production, a
euphemism for ‘privatisation’. Whereas in-house producers are subject
to multiple levels of bureaucratic management, private ­c ompanies enjoy
far greater flexibility in arranging their financial and human resources.
These companies also own franchise licences of major global formats
that most television stations cannot afford to hold. The result is that
­private ­ownership of television is strictly banned in Vietnam, but private ­production of television content has become a norm. A large part
of ­p opular ­c ontent shown by VTV3, the top entertainment channel in
­Vietnam, is now ­produced by private companies, particularly the primetime shows. In these collaborative activities, VTV3 mainly provides the
airwave and plays the gatekeeping role, and in return it gets a negotiated
share of the advertising revenue. The in-house team still produces their
own edutainment and lifestyle shows, often with much less popularity, to
fill up their round-the-clock airing time.
The state, predictably, refuses to loosen its political control regarding the
privatization of television production. While allowing entertainment content to be produced by external companies, the state forbade the outsourcing of news and current affairs (Tuân 2016). This restriction nevertheless
further promotes a television landscape with a little constraint for entertainment programmes and plenty of strict boundaries for news and current
affairs. In ensuring that the whole population gets access to official news,
the state also requires all national and provincial stations to rebroadcast the
Nation, TV, and cultural government
17
7 pm newscast produced by VTV1, the top political channel. This evening
newscast consequently maintains a stable rating, being the only news programme that can compete with celebrity-endorsed shows.
In terms of consumption pattern, television is still a top medium for news and
entertainment in Vietnam, with more than 90 per cent of households having at
least one TV set at home (Tổng Cục Thống Kê 2012). ­Viewers in the North generally enjoy the national channels of VTV, whereas Southerners mainly watch
local programmes, with most popular content produced by Vĩnh Long and Ho
Chi Minh City provincial stations. Game shows, comedies, and dramas maintain the highest ratings across all major cities (Vietnam Tam 2018).
Being one of the countries with the fastest Internet growth in the world,
Vietnam is now joining the global trend of post-broadcasting viewing practices. Whereas in the 1990s and 2000s, television was extremely w
­ elcomed,
nowadays more people are watching videos online (Nielsen Company 2016).
While data on the Vietnamese television industry is relatively ­limited, one
can still detect that television has surely passed its heyday. More ­programmes
were produced, but the total advertisement revenue has e­ xperienced a
marked decline in the last few years (Tiến 2017). More options were available for pay television, with more subscribers each year, but pay service providers did not necessarily earn more (Hữu 2018). The market is thus g­ etting
more saturated, while viewers continue to walk away from traditional television (Nguyên 2015). In sharp contrast to the stable growth and social
respect for television in the 1990s, Vietnamese television, as in anywhere
else in the world, is now struggling to cope with a more uncertain future.
Television thus remains an important mass medium in Vietnam, a­ lbeit with
much-destabilized production and consumption patterns.
Organization
In Chapter 1, I review the birth and early years of television in Vietnam. I
then focus specifically on the advent of television dramas in the 1990s and its
associated cultural effects. I argue that television drama, being the first popular genre of the reform era, marked the rapid penetration of television into
an extensive zone of ordinary living, transforming television from a rare cultural activity into an essential part of everyday practice. Television dramas
allowed viewers to enjoy the new condition of post-Reform ‘normalcy’ that
had gradually replaced their previous experiences of warfare and poverty.
In doing so, the genre of television drama significantly extended the ­sayable
realm of television into the quotidian concerns of domestic life, leaving
behind the previous discourses of socialist heroism that systematically
­excluded the topic of domesticity. As the fabric of everyday life, television
dramas engaged viewers in a pleasurable deviation from the party state’s
ongoing cultural orthodoxy. Such a tactical practice of freedom led viewers
to a new space where private spheres of everyday existence were exposed to
the possibilities of reprogramming.
18
Nation, TV, and cultural government
Based on the context of television dramas, Chapter 2 offers an analysis
of the relationship between television dramas and nationalist memories, as
seen in the two early Vietnamese dramas Hanoian (1996) and The City S
­ tories
(2002). In this chapter, I consider how post-Reform television d
­ ramas enable
different ways of remembering the national past, leading to a pluralizing
of senses of national belonging, each established in a distinctive setting of
collective memory. Hanoian presents a memory dispositif that nostalgically
recalls what is presented as a simple but righteous life during socialist wartime to express moral dissatisfaction about the corrupting power of money
in contemporary situations. In contrast, The City Stories skips any recall
of the socialist past to seek a ‘better yesterday’ that can ethically engage
viewers with the present of marketization and globalization, with which
the socialist past embedded in Hanoian is no longer compatible. The new
past celebrated by The City Stories is located within the sphere of national
‘traditions’, based on an exotic combination of feudal and ­colonial values.
­Although adopting divergent paths, both dramas use ordinary family con­ erforming
flicts to connect personal memories with national histories in p
plural modes of cultural government in the present.
Chapter 3 provides a historical account of the emergence and ­development
of what Frances Bonner terms ‘ordinary television’. In Vietnam, genres of
‘ordinary television’, typically, the game show, the quiz show, the talk show,
and the reality show, gradually outweighed television dramas in terms of
popularity, becoming the key television products from the 2000s onwards.
The proliferation of ordinary television intensified the work of cultural
government when new television genres reached widely and deeply into
many aspects of daily living that had previously been untouched by television dramas and current affairs. Through a dialogue between existing
scholarship on Vietnamese media and the theoretical accounts of ordinary
television, I argue that the development of ordinary genres in Vietnam generated new spaces for subject formation based on the practice of personal
choice, which was significantly different from previous socialist practices
that sought to suppress individual freedom. Put otherwise, new ordinary
genres promoted the language of governmental ethics, that is, the active
care of the self, in contrast to the moralist language of socialism, which
eliminated the possibility of auto-control. Ordinary television operated as
a site of tension ­between participatory and commercial impulses, reflecting
how the neo­liberal promotion of self-empowerment gradually pervades the
popular ­discourse, existing alongside, if not overshadowing, the pedagogic
discourse of political loyalty. Chapter 3 sets the context for the next two
chapters, which focus on two specific instances of how different ordinary
programmes altered the process of national formation, following the new
logics of marketization and globalization.
In Chapter 4, I explore the content and production of Contemporaries,
one of the most famous talk shows on the Vietnamese small screen.
­Contemporaries showcased an extensive variety of successful personalities,
Nation, TV, and cultural government
19
with 400 interviewees appearing to share their journeys to success. Mainly
focussing on stories of businesspeople, who accounted for about one-third
of the total number of guests, I identify the ways in which Contemporaries
directly connected the personal with the national by promoting individualist
contributions instead of political duty. Such connection r­ eflects the way
Contemporaries enabled a new form of nationalist attachment in Vietnam,
one that followed the logics of private entrepreneurship. This new form of
nationalist bonding, while departing from the ­socialist discourse of national
collectivism, deflected the potential for political t­ ension and social inequality
under capitalist transformation and further naturalized the concept of the
nation in the name of personal values.
Chapter 5 incorporates Foucault’s concept of biopower with recent theories of affect to analyze the neoliberal conjuncture of the text, the body, and
the politics of national reconciliation in post-Reform Vietnam. The casestudy programme is As if We Never Parted, a well-known domestic reality
show that reunites missing people. The majority of the missing people in
the programme are victims of previous national tragedies, including multiple wars, various waves of forced migration, and prolonged poverty. In this
case study, I demonstrate how the reality genre allows As if We Never Parted
to work as a technology of affect, turning traumatic texts into a means to
intervene in the visceral aspect of self-formation. The televised trauma in
As if We Never Parted becomes the point where the body and the nation
are intimately enfolded in two contrasting ways. On the one hand, the revelation of silenced pain indicates an implicit resistance to the Vietnamese
party state’s prolonged repression of past tragedies. On the other hand, the
focus on traumatic feelings actually reduces collective violence to a matter
of private victimhood. As if We Never Parted enables a soothing of the latent
wounds of the country, but this is only achieved at the scale of intimate consolation, leaving intact the continuity (if not the expansion) of political and
social injustice under post-Reform capitalist privatization.
The Conclusion summarizes the key arguments of this book, focussing
on the similarities and differences between the case studies. I review the way
the idea of the nation is increasingly embedded in ordinary living. Thanks
to the work of television, national formation becomes more deeply entwined
with the individualized sphere of homemaking and is increasingly associated with intimate stories of self-formation. I then highlight the resistance
and complicity between sovereign and governmental power, emphasizing
how these two modalities of power are actually more compatible than an­
tithetical in the context of post-Reform marketization. This book thus confirms the pertinence of nationalism in Vietnam, while it reveals how such
pertinence inherits as much as deviates from previous norms of warfare
patriotism.
1
Television dramas and the
return of normalcy
Television came extremely late in Vietnam. It was only in the 1990s that the
current national network achieved the status of a mass medium. The advent
of television dramas in 1991, which coincided with the installation of the first
national satellite station, was an important milestone in the e­ stablishment
of an actual national coverage for Vietnamese television. In saying this, it
may seem that I have neglected more than 20 years of television development in Vietnam, starting from 1966 to the late 1980s. D
­ uring this period,
television was in principle a national system but without a national reach.
For decades after its birth, television in Vietnam was limited in its spatial
coverage and was constantly interrupted by warfare, national division,
technical inadequacy, and widespread poverty. Here I briefly outline the
pre-Reform establishment of television to provide a historical background
for the discussion of television dramas that follows. This b
­ ackground also
stands in sharp contrast to the rapid developments of other genres that soon
arrived after the success of television drama, which will be explored in later
chapters.
Pre-Reform television: A history of division and scarcity
During the Second Indochina War, Vietnamese television had two separate
‘histories’ in the North and the South. These parallel television systems directly reflected the conditions of the national division. The earliest television
project was started in the South in 1966 by the Government of the Republic
of Vietnam, fully aided by the United States. According to Hoffer (1972),
the author of one of the few available studies on the Southern broadcasting
­network, the development of television in the South was quite rapid, despite
the escalation of warfare in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Television stations were built in various provinces across the South and transmitted two
channels, one for American forces and the other for the Vietnamese audience (Hoffer 1972, pp. 366–80). In 1970, daily broadcasting time for these
two channels was twelve hours and five hours, respectively (Hoffer 1972,
Appendix E). At the time of the launch in 1966, there were only about 2,500
TV dramas and the return of normalcy
21
TV sets in the South, but this number quickly rose to 300,000 in 1969, and
roughly 450,000 in 1970 (Hoffer 1972, p. 391). Within less than a decade,
the Southern network had obtained a proper shape of a national system.
These data give us a glimpse of the systematic, albeit short-lived, television
network in the South that collapsed in 1975 with the fall of Saigon. The
short history of Southern television was then barely mentioned in the official biography of television in Vietnam (as seen in, for example, Trần 1995;
Vietnam Television 2010b). Vietnam Television (VTV), the current stateowned national television system in Vietnam, is built mainly upon the work
of Northern socialism.
The birth of national television in the Hanoi, which continues up until the
present day, was much less impressive. One might even wonder whether the
early television project in the North should be called ‘broadcasting’ at all, given
the extremely limited scope of network coverage following its­­establishment.
The initial trial, conducted on 7 September 1970, is officially considered the
founding day of VTV. This trial, however, was less an establishment of a
broadcasting system than a small technical experiment done by a few inexperienced workers. According to the memoir of early socialist television
producers, there was absolutely no television equipment in the North in 1970
(Vietnam Television 2005, pp. 26–30). Northern television practitioners manually assembled their first two recorders from an old photographic camera, a
gift from East German colleagues, and two tubes sent home from the Soviet
Union. They also crafted their own televisual antenna by recycling old radio
items. This handmade antenna provided the coverage of about 5–7 kilometres
from the broadcasting hub, within which there were apparently very few viewers because TV sets were extremely rare. Even in its technical aspects, this
founding moment already reflected how Northern television started mainly
with help from socialist countries. The parallel establishments of television
networks in the South (under American aid) and in the North (under Soviet
support) exemplify Vietnam’s position as a Cold War battlefield.
Amidst the escalation of warfare to the North and when a significant number of Hanoi residents had evacuated to evade American bomb,
the ­Hanoi-based television project was not meant to serve ordinary viewers. ­Instead, this project was said to prepare for the future takeover of the
­Southern network once the North won the war (Trần 2010). All early television ­producers in Hanoi had a background in radio, and the first batch
was sent to Cuba for a short training on television production in the late
1960s. Cuba was chosen instead of any nearer socialist countries because of
its ­similar broadcasting infrastructure to America. The Cuban training was
thus ­expected to provide Vietnamese producers with more technical compatibility, once Northern television was unified with the Southern network
(Trần 2010). As recalled by the senior television producer Mã Diệu Cương
­(personal communication, 1 March 2017), then a young novice, it was a deliberate calculation that many Southerners, like Cương himself, were mobilized
22
TV dramas and the return of normalcy
to join the early television team in Hanoi, so that they could later return to
the South to establish the socialist broadcasting system there once the victory
came. Most of these Southerners migrated to the North to serve the socialist
regime after the national division in 1954. On the final days of the Second
Indochina War, a group of television workers led by Huỳnh Văn Tiểng, a
Southern revolutionary journalist/politician, headed South from Hanoi and
reached Saigon right on 30 April 1975, just in time for the takeover. On 1 May
1975, only one day after the end of the war, the socialist team managed to
air their first programme at 7 pm, announcing ‘the liberation’ of Saigon and
‘the reunification’ of the North and the South under the socialist government
(Huỳnh 2010). This event is now marked as the founding moment of what is
currently referred to as Ho Chi Minh City Television, or HTV.
In the North, the scarcity of television in Vietnam continued from 1970
until the late 1980s. From 1970 to 1975, Northern television was constantly
interrupted by warfare with extremely limited airing hours. At times there
was no broadcasting for nearly a year because of intensive bombing from the
American air forces (Vietnam Television 2005, p. 46). After 1975, when peace
was largely restored across the country, television was still far from being a
mass medium because of the lack of TV sets, a poor television signal, and an
erratic supply of electricity. The two border wars with Cambodia and China
in the late 1970s further hindered the development of the television system.
According to Lý Văn Sáu (2010, p. 127), former editor-in-chief of VTV, airing
time in 1977 was only two hours daily in the North with one channel, which
served about 3,000 TV sets, mainly in Hanoi. In 1980, VTV started ‘experimenting’ with colour broadcasting, with a single programme from 9 am to 11
am on Sunday morning (Lý 2010, p. 135). Since 1975, the national television
system has been directly regulated by the central government, while provincial television networks are administered by the provincial authorities. With
the establishment of a socialist regime across Vietnam, television and all
other types of mass media in Vietnam belong to the state.
Local networks were established or rebuilt in major provinces after the
end of the Second Indochina War in 1975. In the early years, most local
stations rebroadcast the national programmes and occasionally aired their
own content. Unsurprisingly, HTV, the television station of Ho Chi Minh
City, was best equipped to broadcast their home-grown shows. During the
1980s, HTV managed to maintain decent programming based on what was
left behind after the war. Widespread poverty and the extension of political censorship, however, prevented Southern television from any significant
leap until around the early 1990s, meaning post-war Southern television had
a trajectory more or less similar to that of VTV in the North.
While the significance of the former national network in the South under the Republic of Vietnam was largely ignored in the official history of
Vietnamese television, there is still a widely acknowledged fact, if not silent pride, among many Southern television producers that HTV inherited
a rich technical legacy from the pre-1975 network. It is also common for
TV dramas and the return of normalcy
23
many Southern producers that I met to see themselves as having the rare
advantage of serving their own local audiences, who had been well ‘trained’
to watch television and thus had developed their distinctive taste before the
arrival of socialist propaganda in 1975. In my fieldwork, many viewers and
producers in Ho Chi Minh City described Southern provincial television
as ‘independent’ and ‘different’ from the North. Northern content is seen
as ‘serious’, ‘political’, or ‘having difficult Hanoi accent’, whereas Southern
programmes are perceived to be local friendly with more traditional melodramas (cải lương) and comedies (tấu hài). According to rating data, Southerners enjoy watching their local channels to a far greater extent than the
national network (Vietnam Tam 2018). The difference between North and
South, in this case, is not simply geographical, but more or less informed by
the subtle but lasting dissatisfaction of many Southerners against the dominance of Northern politics after the end of the war in 1975.
Despite the fact that the television network was established at both the national and provincial levels during the 1980s, television at that time was far
from technically covering the entire land of Vietnam. Programmes aired on
national television from Hanoi were manually recorded on ­v ideotape and
mailed to various provinces for rebroadcasting. It could take days before the
‘national’ programmes reached provincial destinations. The former director
of the station in the province of Hue (Nguyễn 2010b, p. 324) recalled the way
television worked in 1978:
Programs provided by Central Television [now Vietnam Television]
were not stable, first because there were not many of them anyway, and
second because the shipping process was very troublesome. Videotapes
and films from Hanoi were normally sent to our station through the
railway system, so it took at least three days to reach Hue. Sometimes
tapes and films were sent through the airway, but we had to go all the
way to Da Nang airport to get them, which also took around two days.
All the news was thus already ‘stale’ by the time it reached us, so we
needed to do a lot of ‘recooking’ before airing.
The manual transmission of early television programmes in Vietnam was
inefficient at best and primitive at worst. The lack of televisual technology
in the pre-Reform era was even more striking when we consider the fact that,
up to 1978, national programmes could only be distributed to fewer than ten
available local stations, out of more than 50 provinces across the nation.
The rest of the territory remained without a television network (Nguyễn
2010b, p. 324). More local terrestrial earth-based transmitters were installed
in 1979 and during the 1980s, but it was only in 1991, when the national satellite system was introduced, that the television signal technically covered all
of Vietnam (Vietnam Television 2010a, p. 147). This means that during the
1970s and 1980s, viewers across the country watched ‘national’ television in
a highly asynchronous, sporadic, and unstable pattern.
24 TV dramas and the return of normalcy
TV sets were extremely rare in the 1980s. At a time when the threat of a
border war was still lingering, and basic commodities like food and clothes
were scarce, a TV set (together with an electric fan, a refrigerator, and a motorbike) was a symbol of uncommon wealth rather than a normal appliance
in an ordinary home. TV sets were often brought home by people who came
back from oversea, typically the students and workers from Eastern Europe.
Another source of TV sets, mainly used, was Japan. These Japanese sets
were literally ‘trash’ in their homeland, thrown away and then recollected
for ‘export’, but they were extremely valuable in Hanoi. Made-in-­Japan
products, like Sanyo fans, Sony TVs, and Honda bikes, were so much desired in the 1980s, forecasting the booming market of electronic goods and
motorbikes in the 1990s and 2000s.
In 1986, my father bought one of these so-called ‘trashed TVs’ (ti-vi bãi rác),
a tiny white JVC set. This was the first colour TV in my local c­ ommunity.
Our family lived within the so-called ‘collective residential area’ (khu tập
thể), a socialist neighbourhood built for people working at the same state
institution. A majority of my neighbours were colleagues of my parents at
the University of Civil Engineering in Hanoi. Lecturer salary, however, was
hardly adequate for these people to cover modest daily meals with rice and
vegetable (meat was not a regular food, and if any, mainly fat). If my father
had not gone to Angola for a few years to earn some extra money by working
as an ‘educational expert’ (chuyên gia giáo dục), it would have been impossible for my family to be the first in the community to own that JVC set in
1986. Together with the delicious chocolates and gorgeous blue-eyed dolls
that my father brought home from oversea, that TV set represented a kind
of luxury that even a small child like myself could easily detected.
In the late 1980s, my house was often full of neighbours coming to watch
television after dinner. Many evenings, instead of watching television, people ended up chatting about other business under the light of a smoky oil
lamp and over a cup of green tea because the electricity frequently went out
in the middle of a show. Such a practice of neighbourhood viewing quickly
faded around 1990, when a majority of the inhabitants of my community
had their own TV sets at home, and electricity had become much more reliable. In the early 1990s, the Reform started showing clear effects upon urban
households, and in my community, watching television gradually became a
private instead of a neighbourhood ritual.
The Rich Also Cry and the new everyday
The early history of television in Vietnam demonstrates how television was
not yet a ‘normal’ part of daily life before the Reform. In fact, daily life in the
1970s and 1980s was generally not ‘normal’, if we consider a ‘normal’ way of
living as one without the constant interruption of everyday activities by gunfire and hunger. The normalizing process came gradually, with the physical
restoration of peace across the whole country, then the rapid improvement
TV dramas and the return of normalcy
25
in the food supply. Most steady yet almost unnoticeable was the emergence
of the whole complexity of quotidian living: Shopping, ­travelling, dressing
up, eating out, and watching television. All these activities, rarely possible
before the Reform, were now embedded within the o
­ stensibly insignificant
flow of everyday life. The overall improvement of daily living in the 1990s
could best be described as the expansion of ‘normalcy’, or the return of
such, after decades of historical turbulence.
The emerging space of daily normalcy promised new possibilities of personal and collective experiences that potentially altered the formation of
the nation. In his classic essay ‘What is a Nation?’, Renan (1990, p. 12) poses
the question, ‘How is it that France continues to be a nation, when the principle which created it has disappeared?’ The continuity of a nation, Renan
(1990, p. 19) answers, only becomes possible through a collective consensus about a ‘clearly expressed desire to continue a common life’. In Renan’s
thinking, a nation is sustained not only as part of extraordinary struggles to
claim political sovereignty but also as an important source of internal order
and ordinary significance for the daily experiences of individual citizens. A
similar question emerged in the context of Vietnam in the first decade after
the Reform: How is it that Vietnam continued to be a nation, when all the
wars and tragedies that previously defined the name ‘Vietnam’ finally came
to an end? One possible, if unexpected, answer might be ‘By watching The
Rich Also Cry’. The exceptional popularity of imported television dramas in
the 1990s profoundly resonates with Renan’s logic of national continuance
based on the establishment of a novel rhythm for a shared daily life.
In 1991, the broadcast of The Rich Also Cry (‘Người Giàu Cũng Khóc’
in Vietnamese) was an extremely well-known event. In our discussion of
Vietnamese television, most television producers reminded me of the anecdotal fact that The Rich Also Cry was said to reduce the rate of robbery in
Hanoi streets because all Hanoian inhabitants stayed at home after dinner
to ensure that they saw every episode of this Mexican telenovela. In public
discourse, The Rich Also Cry provoked endless discussions about ordinary
concerns: Love, money, and family duties. In late 1991, for example, Hoa
Học Trò, a weekly magazine for teenagers, launched a nationwide contest
among its readers for the best reviewers of The Rich Also Cry, with ‘an
­extremely large number of readers’ mails’ received (Bích 1991). Đỗ Thanh
Hải (personal communication, 5 March 2014), a prominent producer of
early Vietnamese television dramas, recalled the unprecedented success of
this telenovela:
The Rich Also Cry created such a huge wave of public attention when
it was first aired in 1991. I still remember that VTV even produced
­follow-up programs that invited local critics, directors, and scriptwriters to discuss why The Rich Also Cry could attract that much attention
and why we [Vietnamese television producers] hadn’t got such a product
of our own … I think The Rich Also Cry really marked some sort of
26
TV dramas and the return of normalcy
turning point because it was so different from the socialist movies we
had before. The Rich Also Cry really represented a new way of making television fiction, also a new kind of story and format, which lasted
from day to day. Now we all know it is called ‘telenovela’, but at that
time, we just knew that it was a novel type of ‘film’ on television that we
had never seen in Vietnam.
After the triumph of The Rich Also Cry, other imported television dramas
were enthusiastically aired on a daily basis on both national and provincial networks. Notable imported series on VTV and major provincial networks included Simply Maria (‘Đơn Giản Tôi là Maria’, Mexican), Oshin
(‘Osin’, Japanese), Yearnings (‘Khát Vọng’, Chinese), Return to Eden (‘Trở
Lại Eden’, Australian), The Little House on the Prairie (‘Ngôi Nhà Nhỏ Trên
Thảo Nguyên’, American), and Emotions (‘Cảm Xúc’, South Korean). Many
imported television dramas remain remarkable memories, which are still
mentioned in the popular discourse of the 2010s as a romantic reminder of
early post-Reform cultural joy (Hồ 2012; Long 2012; Minh 2012; Ban Văn
Hóa Báo Dân Trí 2013). In 2012, for instance, Dân Trí, a major online news
page in Vietnam, introduced a series of articles reviewing famous foreign
soap operas of the 1990s. The opening story of this series, which was entitled
‘Reliving the Memories of Old Television Dramas’, recalled the arrival of
soap operas in rural areas:
Each episode of television dramas was intensely waited by the whole
village after dinner. Adults and children were circling around a small
black and white 14-inch television to follow every single episode with
acute excitement and passion. In a period still defined by mass deprivation, television dramas, such as Journey to the West, The Rich Also
Cry, Simply Maria, Oshin, The Little House on the Prairie, Yearnings,
had become an indispensable spiritual food (món ăn tinh thần) for Vietnamese viewers.
(Ban Văn Hóa Báo Dân Trí 2013, para. 3)
The fact that imported television dramas could serve as ‘an indispensable
spiritual food’ for Vietnamese viewers in the 1990s reminded us of the
cultural hunger under socialist governance. In fact, many of the early
imported television dramas were produced decades before their premiere
in Vietnam (The Rich Also Cry, for example, was produced in Mexico in
1979, 11 years before its arrival in Vietnam; the American series Little
House on the Prairie was made in 1974 and was introduced in Vietnam
in 1994). The belated success of foreign television dramas in Vietnam
was thus less a reflection of their newness or quality than the desperation of Vietnamese viewers for daily entertainment, something that became much more acute with the positive transformation in their living
conditions.
TV dramas and the return of normalcy
27
The sudden popularity of television dramas in the early 1990s was also the
synthesis of many factors besides the yearning for a more pleasurable life.
The domestic life of ordinary Vietnamese people rapidly improved thanks
to a proliferation of new household appliances. TV sets, both imported and
locally assembled, were available to buy on the open market just a few years
after the Reform (Marr 1998, p. 15). Korean and Japanese companies were
the earliest investors in the Vietnamese electronics industry, with a number
of big brands joining the market in the early 1990s, such as Sony, ­Panasonic,
Toshiba, Samsung, Daewoo, and LG. While Korean companies were newcomers, Japanese groups were return investors. Viettronics Thu Duc, for
example, was a private firm founded in 1971 in the South of Vietnam that
­assembled National TV sets for Panasonic since 1973. After being nationalized in 1977, this company continued to partner with many Japanese
­electronics groups to produce TV sets, which were available in the Southern
market in the 1980s (Viettronics Thu Duc 2015). In 1994, Samsung, a new
player from Korea, installed its first television assembly plant in Vietnam
under a joint venture registered as Savina (combing the words Samsung and
Vietnam). Today, Samsung remains one of the biggest foreign investors in
the country with the largest share of the television market. By 1997, watching
television had become a common practice in urban settings, with 84 per cent
of Ho Chi Minh City households watching television on a daily basis, and
the average viewing time is two hours per family per day (Trần 2000, p. 85).
The pervasive penetration of television dramas after the Reform also
demonstrated the growing capacity of VTV to accommodate more broadcast hours with a wider range of cultural products. Most importantly, in
1991 viewers throughout the country could watch The Rich Also Cry at
the same time because the arrival of The Rich Also Cry coincided with
the installation of the first national satellite system, which significantly
expanded signal coverage across all provinces, except for remote areas
(Vietnam Television 2005, pp. 113–14). The arrival and proliferation of
­television dramas during the 1990s thus marked the transformation of
­Vietnamese television from a rare media practice into a mass medium with
an actual national reach.
The arrival of imported dramas put pressure on local television producers. As director Đỗ Thanh Hải (personal communication, 5 March 2014)
mentioned earlier, Vietnamese producers started wondering about ‘why we
hadn’t got such a product of our own’. In 1994, VTV finally managed to
­produce and broadcast its first domestic television dramas on a weekly basis. Culture and Arts on Sunday (‘Văn Nghệ Chủ Nhật’) was the premiere
programme, providing just one episode of Vietnamese drama each weekend. At that time the making of a singular drama was not too difficult for
­Vietnamese producers, who usually had their training and experience in cinematic production. But the idea that television fictions should be provided
on a regular basis throughout the year was completely novel and certainly
ambitious. One episode per week was an extremely low frequency, compared
28
TV dramas and the return of normalcy
with the daily regularity of imported series, but was already a remarkable
achievement for domestic television. As a report in Lao Động newspaper in
1994 put it, the programme Culture and Arts on Sunday ‘demonstrated an
audacious effort by VTV3 to produce quick and cheap dramas, given an
extreme lack of money, technologies, and human resources’ (Tô 1995). The
making of Vietnamese television dramas marked an important change in
terms of television production: VTV started making periodic, low-cost, and
audience-oriented programmes, directing itself towards a promising market
of over 70 million Vietnamese viewers.
Unsurprisingly, Vietnamese audiences, who were conventionally provided only with soap operas sourced from foreign countries, embraced local
products. According to an audience survey conducted by VTV in 1996, Culture and Arts on Sunday was the most watched programme, with the highest
demand for more broadcasting time among all VTV shows (Nguyễn 1996).
In many daily newspapers from 1994 to 1996, the terms ‘television drama’
and ‘Culture and Arts on Sunday’ repeatedly appeared in culture sections
as a major topic of public discussion. Local newspapers frequently praised
Vietnamese television dramas for their distinctive familiarity, while raising
concerns about local quality in competing with foreign products (see, for
example, Vinh 1994; Tô 1995). ‘Serving the audience’ (phục vụ khán giả) has
become a standard concept in newspaper reviews of VTV dramas, which
alternated from the previous discourse that saw viewers more as passive
­receivers of the party state’s propaganda than valued customers.
The success of television dramas was a common phenomenon throughout
many post-socialist contexts, for example, in Eastern European countries
after the breakup of the Soviet Union (Baldwin 1995; Boym 1995; Stan 2003)
and in China after the economic reform in 1978 (Zha 1995; Zhu, Keane,
and Bai 2008). Boym (1995, p. 81) describes the situation in Russia: ‘In the
summer of 1992, while the “historic” constitutional trial of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union was taking place, the majority of the citizens of
the former Soviet Union preferred to watch a Mexican soap opera made
seventeen years earlier with the sentimental title The Rich Also Cry’. In
Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, and Bosnia, television dramas were also the
favourite form of ordinary entertainment amidst political turbulence after
the breakup. Stan (2003, p. 50) writes about the case of Bosnia: ‘During
the bloody wars that tore their country apart, hundreds of thousands of
­Yugoslavs held their breath so as not to miss the tiniest detail of the Venezuelan telenovela Kassandra’. A similar situation also happened in China,
where dramas gained tremendous popularity in the late 1990s (Zhu et al.
2008, p. 9). Clearly, viewers in post-socialist contexts enjoyed television dramas not just as a form of popular entertainment, but more importantly as
consolation after a long period of authoritarianism and a source of daily joy
to help them cope with the current political unrest.
Ardent fandom for soap operas in Vietnam in the 1990s was of no exception. In fact, the arrival of soap operas in Vietnam was a direct cultural
TV dramas and the return of normalcy
29
result of the Cold War. The initial engagement of Vietnamese television with
the global media landscape did not come from the Anglo-American world,
where globalization is often assumed to have originated, but from distinctive connections with the socialist and post-socialist world. In the 1980s and
1990s, the perception of ‘the West’ (Tây) in Vietnam was mainly refracted
through the country’s prolonged comradeship with Eastern European countries, particularly thanks to thousands of Vietnamese people sent there to
study and work there. Television genres unfamiliar to ‘traditional’ socialist
media first arrived in Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War and then
were transferred and readapted into Vietnam a few years later. The Rich
Also Cry and many other telenovelas were great hits in post-Soviet countries before they enjoyed their exceptional success in Vietnam. Interestingly
enough, the socialist partnership had aided the establishment of Northern
Vietnamese Television in 1970 as the direct mouthpiece of the party state,
and socialist bonding also introduced Vietnamese television into the flows
of global media.
The legacy of the Cold War was evident in VTV until at least 2017. Many
leading and well-known developers and innovators of VTV after the Reform
had a background of socialist education in the 1980s. These include, for
example, Trần Đăng Tuấn (founder of VTV3, former vice-director of VTV),
Trần Bình Minh (director of VTV from 2011), Lại Văn Sâm (head of VTV3
from 1996 to 2016), Tạ Bích Loan (head of VTV6 from 2008 to 2016, host of
the talk show Contemporaries, and current head of VTV3), and Thu Uyên
(a senior television developer and host of the reality show As if We Never
Parted). As later chapters reveal, despite their direct connection with the
world of socialism (or precisely because of such), these producers represent
a decisive departure from the socialist style of propaganda. Being among
the few who had a chance to ‘go West’ (đi Tây) to learn and work outside
of Vietnam in the 1980s, these people served as the most active pioneers to
adapt the fresh experience of television in Eastern Europe to the context of
Vietnam. Socialist legacies, paradoxically, have provided VTV with a crucial resource to reach beyond the ideological boundaries of socialism.
Television dramas as tactical resistance
Television drama, generally considered ‘a women’s genre’, has been an important object of feminist studies (for a list and a review of major feminist
studies on soap opera, see Brunsdon 1995, 2000). Many of these studies are
more or less influenced by de Certeau’s framework of everyday practice,
which emphasizes the way ordinary women creatively make use of the existing social structure, and in so doing perform their act of tactical resistance
against the dominant system. From this perspective, television dramas are
analyzed not only in terms of their implicit ideological values but also in light
of how melodramatic narratives are consumed in ways not fully intended by
the texts. Ang (1985), for example, argues that, despite the widely circulated
30
TV dramas and the return of normalcy
caution about the ideological manipulation of mass culture, viewers’ actual reception of the soap opera Dallas does not simply reflect their passive
submission to ideologies. Some viewers actually enjoy watching D
­ allas for
‘the irony they bring to bear on it’, particularly through the reflective act
of mocking (Ang 1985, p. 98). Ardent fans of Dallas, on the other hand,
are often ambivalently torn between their rational hesitation due to the
­reputation of soap opera as ‘low culture’ and the irresistible temptation to
immerse themselves in the sentimental feeling offered by Dallas. Above all,
Dallas’s appeal to viewers lies in the particular kinds of affective pleasure
it offers to viewers, which cannot be reduced to mere ideology. So, against
the view that treats women as ‘passive victims of the deceptive message of
soap operas’, Ang (1985, p. 119) suggests seeing pleasure as a kind of fantasy
­necessary for women to endure and enjoy life when the days of gender equality are still to come. In her words (1985, p. 134, emphasis added),
But it is impossible to live solely with a feeling of discomfort. We cannot
wait until the distant Utopia is finally achieved: here and now we must
be able to enjoy life, if only to survive. In other words, any uneasiness
with the present, with the social situation in which we now find ourselves, must be coupled with an (at least partial) positive acceptance and
affirmation of the present. Life must be experienced as worth the effort,
not just because a prospect exists for a better future, but also because
the present itself is a potential source of pleasure.
While Ang (1985, p. 132) carefully warns feminists against ‘the danger of an
overpoliticalising of pleasure’, she values the capacity of soap opera to offer
women some space of emotional consolation against the unpleasant reality
of everyday living. In this sense, soap opera is a source of tactical resistance
that does not lead to radical transformations but is crucial for the continuity
of female daily survival. Brown (1994, p. 173), in a study with a more explicit
connection to de Certeau’s framework of everyday politics, terms the ways
in which women consume melodramatic narratives as ‘the pleasure of resistance’. This kind of pleasurable subversion allows women, in the position of
repressed subjects under patriarchal domination, to enjoy and produce their
own meanings and identities from the melodramatic narratives provided to
them by the mass media.
The framework of everyday resistance can well explain the popularity of
television dramas in Vietnam in the 1990s. But the post-socialist context
suggests that there could be a wider range of ‘the weak’, to use de Certeau’s
term (1984, p. xvii), to be included in the studies of soap operas than just
women. The enthusiasm for television dramas in Vietnam in the early years
after the Reform was prominently a solace for the recent past of cultural
deprivation under political oppression, and a kind of half-deafness to what
remained of socialist authoritarianism (the possibility of female resistance
was of course not excluded).
TV dramas and the return of normalcy
31
Television dramas offered a clear alternative to the scarcity and ideological boredom of previous cultural products in Vietnam. Before the Reform,
many forms of popular entertainment were banned from the public discourse
­(Zinoman 1994; Taylor 2001, pp. 23–55). Too much romance or amusement
was considered the harmful legacy of the bourgeois culture that only led to
‘an erosion of (especially) youth’s revolutionary and military spirit’ (Taylor
2001, p. 40). The circulation of ‘yellow music’ (nhạc vàng), sentimental songs
about love, separation, and nostalgia, was publicly denounced after 1975.
Western pop music was rarely allowed on the radio in the 1980s, ‘but never on
television’ (Taylor 2001, p. 150). On the small screen, viewers mainly saw propagandist news, socialist movies, and revolutionary music, with other o
­ ptions
limited to old animal documentaries, Soviet cartoons, and ­Russian language
lessons. The Soviet animated series Well, Just You Wait (‘Hãy Đợi Đấy’) was
repeatedly aired, being virtually the only children’s cartoon on t­ elevision
before the arrival of Tom and Jerry (‘Tom và Jerry’) in the early 1990s.
­Occasionally at weekends, theatrical plays were recorded and played back on
the small screen. These plays were so notorious for their tedium that there was
a popular saying, ‘phở mậu dịch, kịch ti-vi’, that compared television plays with
the bland rice noodles sold in state food stores. Phở, the most f­ amous dish of
Hanoian cuisine, was often served tasteless with barely chewable noodles and
hardly any meat in the state-run shops, the only places that sold ready-made
food in the 1980s. The saying ‘phở mậu dịch, kịch ti-vi’ thus presented a concise
depiction of the living discomfort during the 1980s: Bad television and terrible
food. This saying reflected how pre-Reform television was more a symbol of
political discipline and cultural deprivation than a source of daily enjoyment.
The dominant fictional genre of pre-Reform television was the socialist
movie. Vietnamese films made during and after the Second Indochina War,
mostly black and white, were repeatedly shown on television in the 1970s
and 1980s. Soviet and East German movies as gifts from socialist friends
were also broadcast (Nguyễn 2010a). Socialist cinema focussed mainly on
depicting the extraordinary courage of soldiers in the context of wars, embracing the aesthetic of revolutionary heroism. So in the late 1980s, if viewers had a chance to watch some fictional narratives on small screens, they
saw epic scenes and edifying lessons.
Consider, for example, the famous Vietnamese movie The Abandoned
Field: Free Fire Zone (‘Cánh Đồng Hoang’, 1979) that tells the story of an indomitable Viet Cong couple who fought against American troops while raising their newborn son. The wife performs all ‘normal’ maternal a­ ctivities,
often singing her loving lullabies against noisy American helicopters ­circling
above her head, trying to kill her small family. She is a mother, but more
importantly an honourable Viet Cong soldier who chooses to sacrifice her
personal happiness in pursuing patriotic duty. In The Abandoned Field: Free
Fire Zone, a socialist family is still a family, but not just that. Through the
lens of socialist aesthetics, family life was only acknowledged once it was
abstracted by patriotic socialism.
32
TV dramas and the return of normalcy
After the Reform, life was no longer epic: There was no gunfire, helicopters, or daily killing. Small screens needed small stories that could
reflect the ordinary concerns of ‘normal’ living. This was when imported
television dramas made their impressive debut by epitomizing the ordinariness of life, not its extraordinariness. In watching The Rich Also Cry,
viewers had a delightful relief: Family was now just family (and mother
was just mother!). The Rich Also Cry tells the story of Marianna, a poor
country girl finding her way to the city, falling in (painful) love, having
children, and becoming rich. The endless dramas in this 100-episode telenovela happened solely within family settings, and Marianna represented
nothing but the bittersweet experiences of a woman in the pursuit of her
own desire.
In 1992–1993, when I was a grade-3 pupil, another Latin telenovela, ­Simply
Maria, was also very popular in Vietnam. At school, I was still loaded
with history lessons about Vietnam’s heroic resistance against France and
­A merica. We chanted Uncle Ho’s teachings every Monday morning in our
flag-­saluting assembly and sang songs that worshipped the party. One of
the most frequently performed songs in my elementary school was ‘I am the
seedling of the Party’ (Em Là Mầm Non Của Đảng), in which children were
compared with ‘young bamboo shoots’ (búp măng non) growing in ‘revolutionary season’ (mùa cách mạng). The chorus of this song is
Có sách mới áo hoa ấy là nhờ ơn Đảng ta
Vui tung tăng em ca, có Đảng cuộc đời nở hoa
My new books and floral shirts are all from the Party’s generosity
I sing and dance happily because with the Party, life is blossoming.
These verses clearly stated that the party took perfect care of Vietnamese
children, body and soul, by providing good knowledge and beautiful fashion. Such an idealized vision of socialist goodness was obviously inaccurate
in describing my actual reality. In the early 1990s, thanks to my father’s
oversea income, my family started having a stable portion of meat every day
after years of protein hunger, and fruit was occasionally served after ­dinner
as a special treat. Books and clothes were mostly hand-me-downs from
brothers and cousins. New outfits and fancy toys, if any, were sent home
by my father and relatives working in Africa and Eastern Europe. Life was
indeed getting better in the early 1990s, but definitely not due to the ‘Party’s
generosity’, and it had never been. For a child like me who always dreamed
of Western milk chocolates, Russian bubble gums, and fancy blonde-haired
dolls, ‘the Party’ was an abstract concept that generated boredom mixed
with a vague feeling of threat.
At the arrival of Simply Maria in 1992, the gap between what was
­ideologically imposed at school and my daily life grew even larger. Simply
Maria was so enjoyed that a short rhyme featuring all the main characters
was widely circulated as a kind of ‘folk song’ among Hanoi communities.
TV dramas and the return of normalcy
33
I remember myself chanting these simple verses with my friends when we
were playing after school:
Maria là nhà tạo mốt
Juan Carlos là đồ bỏ đi
Bà Machi là người dân tộc
Con rắn độc là mụ Lauren
Người hay ghen là anh Victor
Người hay lo là anh Louis
Fashion designer is Maria
Juan Carlos is pathetic
Aunty Machi is an ethnic
Poisonous snake is ugly Lauren
Jealous man is brother Victor
Anxious is brother Louis
It turned out that what actually made us ‘sing and dance happily’ in the
early 1990s was not ‘the Party’s generosity’, but a Latin American soap
opera that generated so much trivial discussion and banal pleasure in my
neighbourhood. There was something both estranging and familiarizing
in the way The Rich Also Cry and Simply Maria entered our daily lives.
­Estrangement because, after decades of socialist cultural edification, for the
first time we saw blatant sentimentality on public television. Viewers like my
mother and aunts, who were thoroughly acquainted with the high moral lessons of socialist movies, suddenly found themselves irresistibly engulfed in
unashamed plots about premarital pregnancy, couple intimacy, love affairs,
and dirty tricks in stealing another’s husband. But the alienation from previous socialist moral codes simultaneously provoked an appealing sense of familiarity. Soap operas, however sentimental, were much closer to our daily
business: Money, love, and family struggle. For at least a few transitional
years after the Reform, soap operas, in their public shallowness, encouraged
Vietnamese viewers to have more sensitivity to their personal and intimate
lives, enabling them to depart from socialist collectivism without the fear
of being political outcasts. For a ten-year-old girl like me, the ­Caribbean
style of beauty in The Rich Also Cry and Simply Maria (dark wavy hair,
big brown eyes, guitar-shaped body curves, and Bohemian dresses) was
particularly arresting. I was charmed by the way female characters freely
expressed their feelings, their liberty in exposing bodily beauty, and their
easy mobility from rural to urban and from poor to rich. The girls in my
neighbourhood started braiding their hair following a hairstyle in Simply
Maria, while my mother and her friends had their hair permed similar to
Mariana (actress Verónica Castro) in The Rich Also Cry. At a very young
age, I learned that it was quite ‘normal’ to see a vast mismatch between the
‘serious stuff’ taught at school and what I could enjoy at home on television.
I found it not too difficult to navigate between two different worlds: One of
34
TV dramas and the return of normalcy
moralist lessons learned by heart to pass my exams (I got quite good grades)
and the other of ordinary joy and concerns surrounding food, fashion, children’s games, and, most enticingly, sentimental dramas. At school we still
sang socialist songs, but with post-Reform life gradually being pervaded by
the pleasurable triviality of popular entertainment, the ideal of children being ‘bamboo shoots’ in ‘revolutionary season’ became much less convincing
and increasingly irrelevant to my peers and me.
Mundane and domestic conflicts were also key themes in early Vietnamese
television dramas shown weekly on Culture and Arts on Sunday, where viewers no longer found politicized elaborations of socialist doctrines. Traces of
warfare were still apparent in many home-grown dramas but mainly served
as a shared past upon which ordinary tensions in contemporary life arose.
Director Nguyễn Khải Hưng (personal communication, 22 March 2014),
founder of Culture and Arts on Sunday and producer of numerous domestic
dramas, commented that the abandonment of political content and the embrace of daily concerns were the key attractions of early Vietnamese television dramas. As he elaborated,
In older movies, good characters are just like saints. They are too much
higher than us, too much different from us. In watching these old movies, we always have to look up! When I started Culture and Arts on
­Sunday in 1994, I wanted a change. There should be more ‘life’ (đời sống)
on television. We don’t need heroic examples anymore. You know what
I mean, right? No more heavy moral lessons (bài học đạo đức nặng nề).
Television is watched at home, so the more similarity viewers can find
between their own stories and the stories on television, the better it is.
Khải Hưng’s opinions of viewers’ weariness of socialist ‘heavy moral ­lessons’
were a timely diagnosis, which was confirmed by the instant ­popularity
achieved by his television dramas in the late 1990s. Vietnamese television
dramas intensified the mundane pleasure previously provided by foreign
soap operas by presenting relevant and contextualized stories to ­Vietnamese
viewers. Thanks to the success of both imported and domestic dramas, the
theme of revolutionary heroism, while continuing to form a part of television content, had lost its previous dominance.
The widespread fandom towards television dramas in the early 1990s well
served as an example of everyday resistance against the socialist cultural
repression. De Certeau (1984, p. xvii) describes such acts of resistance: ‘The
tactics of consumption, the ingenious ways in which the weak make use of
the strong, thus lend a political dimension to everyday practices’. Or, to borrow from Brown (1994, p. 170) in the context of female resistance, television
dramas allowed Vietnamese viewers to ‘begin to work politically at the level
of everyday life’. While Vietnamese viewers were enjoying their private time
watching television series, they were able to negotiate their personal stories
in a dialogue with the televised fictional narratives without worrying much
TV dramas and the return of normalcy
35
about orthodox norms. Viewers were able to decide their own ways of navigating the space of emotional relationships whereby individual ­identities
were bonded to the values, memories, and meanings of family, community, and nation. Television drama thus served as the first television genre
to ­generate, on a mass scale, a participatory opportunity for Vietnamese
publics to engage in governing the process of individual and collective
identification.
The focus on bottom-up resistance in explaining the relationship between
television dramas and the late-socialist subjects, however, risks fetishizing
the resilience of ‘the weak’ while underestimating the parallel complexity of
power systems. Abu-Lughod terms such fetishization the ‘romance of resistance’. In her words (Abu-Lughod 1990, p. 42),
There is perhaps a tendency to romanticize resistance, to read all forms
of resistance as signs of the ineffectiveness of systems of power and
of the resilience and creativity of the human spirit in its refusal to be
dominated. By reading resistance in this way, we collapse distinctions
between forms of resistance and foreclose certain questions about the
workings of power.
Forms of resistance are inseparable from forms of power. Subversion of
one form of power might indicate subjection to another form of power.
­Abu-Lughod (1990, p. 41) thus suggests using resistance ‘as a diagnostic of
power’, instead of as mere evidence of the deficiency of power systems.
The tendency to ‘romanticize’ resistance is more or less evident in some
studies of Vietnamese television dramas and the practice of fandom in the
1990s. For example, in an analysis of 12A and 4H (‘12A và 4H’), a popular
­Vietnamese television drama about youth and love aired in 1995, D
­ rummond
(2003, p. 156) argues that this drama manifests how ­Vietnamese youngsters
manage to ‘construct new forms of identity for themselves’ against the
­hegemonic power of the party state and Confucian traditions. In ­another
study that explores the relationship between popular culture and the prospect of civil society in Vietnam, Thomas and Heng (2001, p. 306) also
­argue that consumers of popular media in the early years after the Reform
could ­acquire an ‘agency’ that is ‘itself constructing political and cultural
­meaning’. In these cases, the acts of resistance appear to have an autonomic
quality, hinting at a state of freedom outside the regulation of power.
Regarding the turn to bottom-up resistance in multiple studies of economic and cultural practices in Vietnam post-Reform, Harms (2012, p. 418)
gives a warning in an anthropological study of the practice of feng shui in
Vietnam:
Despite the felicity of a turn toward taking local agency seriously, there
are dangers to this methodological turn. To put it plainly, the new focus
on local actors and individual agency, while important as a corrective to
36 TV dramas and the return of normalcy
state centred analysis, risks an uncritical celebration of individualism,
the very same viewpoint that forms the theoretical basis of neoliberal
thought.
Harm’s warning is particularly applicable to the case of newly emerging
forms of popular media in Vietnam, in which tactical resistance against
old cultural norms is inseparable from a submission to alternative national
and global economies of popular entertainment. The lack of analysis of the
mechanism of resistance from below risks simplifying the complexity of
power systems whereby ‘agency’ is itself the effect of, instead of a negation
of, power.
So how could early television dramas in Vietnam enable the construction of alternative identities? What mechanisms are employed; and to what
ends? When viewers escape from the party state, what do they escape to
and for? Can we use viewers’ tactical resistance, following the suggestion of
Abu-Lughod, to ‘diagnose’ the emergence of some new modality of power
enabled by post-Reform television? How can we avoid the risk of overemphasizing state power without falling into the pitfall of romanticizing local
resistance?
Television dramas as cultural government
Instead of focussing on the question of everyday resistance, I am interested
in the ways television dramas enabled a new visibility and new organization for post-Reform daily life, which made resistance possible. Studies of
television dramas in the West are normally set within a taken-for-granted
context of everyday living, where television is already something ‘normal’.
But in the case of Vietnam, the sense of mediated everydayness had to be
established before it could enable an act of everyday resistance. The possibility of resistance in this case did not arrive by itself, but with a wider
and deeper ­penetration of power relations into the fabric of everyday life.
In other words, the proliferation of television dramas in the 1990s turned
ordinary life into an important field of cultural negotiation that potentiated
both subversion and subjection.
In ‘Live of Infamous Men’, Foucault (2003b) traces the emergence of
everyday life as a site of modern power when he examined police reports
about the ‘grey and ordinary’ lives of numerous French prisoners who lived
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As Foucault (2003b, p. 287) argues, the everyday was only ‘born’ when it was reached by a technology of
power, which in his specific study was the combination of ordinary petitions
and police systems. These two technologies of power turned the detailed
variations of common living into possible objects of government. ‘Neighbourhood dispute, the quarrels of parents and children, misunderstandings
between couples, the excesses of wine and sex, public altercations, and many
secret passions would all be caught in the nets of power which stretched
TV dramas and the return of normalcy
37
through rather complex circuits’ (Foucault 2003b, pp. 288–9). This is not to
argue that the everyday did not exist before a touch of power, but that voices
from the everyday remained unheard until power as ‘a beam of light’ came
to rest upon those lives of the most ordinary individuals (Foucault 2003b,
p. 282). The integration of governing techniques into the details of common
living turned everyday life into a new source and target of power.
A new sense of everydayness also emerged in Vietnam with the arrival
of television drama. This television genre, understood as a new technology
of power (and resistance), had enabled a space where post-Reform, everyday living could be talked about, recorded, made sense of, given order, and
granted connection. Voices from the everyday, once unheard by political
power unless turned into a means to boost the extraordinariness of socialist
heroes as seen in movies like The Abandoned Field: Free Fire Zone, were
now important means and objects of cultural government. Williams (1989,
p. 4) writes about a similar situation when dramas started pervading British
­television after the Second World War: ‘What is really new, so new I think that it
is difficult to see its significance, is that it is not just a matter of audiences for
particular plays. It is that drama, in quite new ways, is built into the rhythms
of everyday life’. post-Reform everyday life in Vietnam, ‘in quite new ways’,
was enriched by the regular flow of television dramas, novel conventions
of melodramatic representations, emerging ensembles of past hardship and
new futures, and above all by a new sense of connectedness between what
was publicly shown on television and the private living of ordinary viewers.
The dispersed intervention of television dramas into everyday life in
­Vietnam can be traced across three dimensions: Temporal, spatial, and the
vernacular. Temporally, the repetitive rhythm of television dramas provided
a certain sequential order for the new activities of post-Reform living that,
as Thomas comments (2002, p. 1611), had gone relatively ‘out of control’ and
created a certain sense of chaos. In her defence of everyday life, Felski (1999)
argues that repetition is an important feature of daily living, not because it
evinces the boredom of a regular pattern, but because repetition is crucial in
setting the conditions for creativity and change. ‘Repetition is one of the ways
in which we organize the world, make sense of our environment and stave
off the threat of chaos’ (Felski 1999, p. 21). In the 1990s, television drama’s
serial nature performed a ‘world organising’ function, to borrow Felski’s
words, that anchored Vietnamese viewers to their ordinary time, enhancing
the clarity to the new chaos enabled by the Reform, building a new kind of
­ eaning-making
daily ritual that set the foundation for new processes of m
and identity formation. As director Đỗ Thanh Hải ­( personal communication, 5 March 2014, emphasis added) stresses, the novelty of The Rich Also
Cry in 1991, which differentiated it from older fictional texts on Vietnamese
small screens, was that this drama ‘lasted from day to day’. It is thus of no
coincidence that television listings started appearing in major Vietnamese
daily newspapers, such as Thanh Niên, Tuổi Trẻ, and Sài Gòn Giải Phóng
around 1994–1996, right at the heyday of television dramas. Only when
38 TV dramas and the return of normalcy
television became necessary and insignificant enough as part of a shared
daily routine that its schedule could be regularly included in daily newspapers. Similar to the folio line or the weather forecast, the television listings
reminded readers of the infinite and steady flow of their common life, even
when no one might actually ‘read’ this content, except in the case of a
­random check or extreme boredom. Almost unnoticeably, dramas turned
Vietnamese television into an inherent component of ordinary living, adding material and symbolic substance to the ‘business as usual’ quality of
everyday rituals. At the arrival of dramas, the rhythm of post-Reform ­living
was now clocked by popular entertainment, and Vietnamese television
­began to work as a cultural metronome of post-Reform time, punctuating
everyday life with its scheduled pleasure.
Spatially, in 1991, millions of ordinary individuals across the whole national territory could watch the same visual text, an episode of The Rich
Also Cry, at their own homes and for their own amusement. Such viewing
simultaneity exemplified Anderson’s conceptualization of the nation as an
‘imagined community’ enabled by the mass circulation of public discourses,
as seen in the instance of print capitalism in eighteenth-century Europe
(2006, p. 44). When post-Reform viewers were watching a television drama,
they also imagined themselves being a part of their family, their neighbourhood, their cohort of colleagues, their city co-inhabitants, and their fellow
citizens, who might be watching the same episode at the same moment. The
nation, once imagined epically in socialist aesthetics, was now imagined
melodramatically within the private space of a home. The national territory
as an abstract geographical concept is now brought into a direct contact
with the intimate sphere of homemaking.
Television dramas also directly altered the ways ordinary people talked
about their own life. To use the words of Foucault (2003b, p. 289), the d
­ ispersal
of power into the sphere of everyday life led to ‘the birth, consequently, of an
immense possibility of discourse’. Together with the ‘folk song’ mentioned
earlier featuring Simply Maria, many phrases from early imported television
dramas officially entered the vernacular, changing how Vietnamese viewers
expressed and made sense of their daily lives. ‘The rich also cry’ has become
a common idiom, signifying the limit of wealth. Money, once a symbol of
moral corruption in the time of orthodox socialism, became an important
object of daily discussion amidst the rapid transformation of household
economies. The name ‘Oshin’ has been normalized into a noun for a domestic maid because the lead female, Oshin, was a maid in the Japanese series
Oshin. Without the capital O, the word ‘oshin’ gradually morphed into a
Vietnamese common word to name a new profession that served the busy
lifestyle of emerging middle-class families after the Reform. Viewers also
borrowed words from My Fair Princess, an extremely popular Chinese series
set in the Qing dynastic time. ‘Aka’ (prince) and ‘cách cách’ (princess), two
Manchurian words in My Fair Princess, are now used as colloquial nouns to
label pampered sons and daughters in many areas of Vietnam.
TV dramas and the return of normalcy
39
The blending of television dramas into daily conversations confirms
Martín-Barbero’s argument (1995, p. 276) in the context of Latin ­A merica
that television dramas could ‘make it possible for the urban masses to
­appropriate modernity without abandoning their oral culture’. Conversely,
the interweaving of mass-scale televised narratives into daily activities also
meant that the space of ‘oral culture’ was increasingly recruited into the
regulation of mediated power. With the arrival of television dramas, ordinary Vietnamese life acquired a new and vast public dimension that was
simultaneously private. Such novel entanglement between public texts and
domestic pleasure greatly departed from the socialist ideology that was imposed from outside individual subjectivities in the name of some collective
good. Television dramas had thus performed a significant redistribution of
power relations that regulated various aspects of both domestic living and
collective belonging in post-Reform Vietnam.
Television drama was the first genre that permitted Vietnamese television
to operate simultaneously as a ‘technology of domination’ and a ­‘technology
of the self’. The contact of these two technologies, as Foucault (2003g, p. 147)
argues, enacts the work of governmentality. Television dramas served as
a technology of domination by imposing a certain temporal routine upon
post-Reform ordinary activities and a spatial simultaneity upon anonymous
viewers across the national territory. Television dramas thus submitted their
viewing subjects to the temporal and spatial regulation of the nation. Even
when viewers chose to enjoy television dramas as they wished and when the
content of television dramas did not demonstrate any explicit nationalist
tendency, the effect of television dramas still more or less depended on various technological, linguistic, and political mechanisms that fundamentally
fostered the unity of the national time and space. As part of a governmental
practice, the dominating force of television drama operated without a clear
form of enclosure as seen in the typical spaces of disciplinary power, such
as the factory, the school, and the hospital. Television dramas perform their
control over the viewing subjects through an increasingly dispersed mechanism, working through a process of ‘environmental formation’, to use the
words of Deleuze (1988, p. 31), that integrates disciplinary power into an
open regime of cultural government at the absence of a rigid boundary between the inside and the outside of the dominated sphere.
Television dramas also worked as a typical ‘technology of the self’ by
seducing viewers to adapt television content into their own lives. Many authors have analyzed the way television drama enacts a process of subject formation at an individual, if not intimate, level. Ang (1985, p. 47) claims that in
watching television dramas, viewers ‘recognize themselves’ while enjoying
a kind of ‘psychological reality’ on a daily basis. Abu-Lughod (2002, p. 123)
also notices that in the case of an Egyptian woman, there was a close connection between television melodrama and the ways ‘she constructed herself
as a subject’. Similarly, Brown (1994, p. 182) asserts that television dramas
operate most actively as part of the private sphere. Television dramas are
40
TV dramas and the return of normalcy
thus a technology of the self because they enable viewers to choose their
own ways of interacting with melodramatic narratives, and thus to play an
active role in the making of their own selves.
Traces of Vietnamese viewers’ self-reflective engagement with television
dramas could be found abundantly in Vietnamese public discourse during
the 1990s. In 1999, for instance, Sài Gòn Giải Phóng, a major daily newspaper in Ho Chi Minh City, published a large number of readers’ letters
about their favourite characters in television dramas, which more or less
resembled the letters that Ang received from Dallas viewers in her study of
the melodramatic imagination. The majority of viewers who sent letters to
Sài Gòn Giải Phóng chose a character from a South Korean drama, reflecting the early stage of the Korean Wave in Vietnam. The remaining letters
focussed mainly on either Chinese or Vietnamese figures. But, regardless
of their origins, the chosen characters all served as points of reference for
viewers to reflect upon their private lives. Some extracts show us the ways
in which viewers used television dramas as materials for subject formation:
‘The father in this drama really represents my own parents, poor farmers
working all day in the rice field … While watching this drama, I felt deeply
grateful to all the sacrifice my parents had made for me’ (Lâm 1999). Or ‘I
feel so close to him [the leading male], and that’s why I am really fond of
him. I feel like seeing my own image in him’ (Lê 1999). Or ‘When the drama
ended, I felt like I had just lost a beloved friend!’ (Lê 1999). Another interesting reflection: ‘Who in this wide world dare say that he or she could stay
outside the pain of love? I just wonder if I would be as jealous as Tú Xảo [the
lead female] if I were in her position?’ (Lý 1999).
The way Vietnamese viewers adapted melodramatic content into their
own lives did not indicate a failure to maintain a critical distance between
reality and fiction. Rather, viewers selectively ‘experienced’ the melodramatic narratives in ways that enriched their personal lives, and in so doing internalized the stories shown on television into their own process of
self-making. Many viewers were thus not only governed by the totalizing
effect of television drama but, more importantly, also enjoyed the role of a
self-governor in folding the outer narratives into the inner substance of their
own life. In this case, to borrow the words of Deleuze, ‘the domination of
others must be doubled by a domination of oneself’ (1988, p. 101). ­Television
drama thus functions as a mechanism that individualizes the governed subjects who at the same time submitted themselves to the mass regulation of
national television. So if television dramas in the 1990s provided viewers
with a pleasurable escape from grand narratives of socialism, then what they
escaped to was another battle of intimate subjectification through the massification of self-reflection.
The governmental effects of television dramas, however, were neither unified nor autonomous. As a technology of domination, television dramas were
only produced and distributed under the constraints of a certain historical
availability of television techniques, human resources, and market demand.
TV dramas and the return of normalcy
41
As a technology of the self, the individualizing effects of television dramas
were not equally distributed and did not have the same intensity on different viewing subjects. Technologies of government, as Rose (1999b, p. 52)
asserts, ‘have no essence’. So the question of television dramas as a governmental technology needs to be empirically anchored to a situated ensemble
of texts and contexts under specific historical and cultural circumstances.
In the next chapter, I compare two particular Vietnamese television dramas
to reveal how these cultural products enabled different forms of cultural
government based on the specific construction of post-Reform nationalist
nostalgia.
2
Nostalgia for the new oldness
There were two somewhat contradictory memorial practices enabled by
television dramas after the Reform. In the early 1990s, The Rich Also Cry
and many other foreign dramas invited Vietnamese viewers to engage in
a temporary state of amnesia, so that they could enjoy the fresh atmosphere of normalcy enabled by economic improvement. Alternatively because most imported soap operas in Vietnam in the 1990s were actually
old in their countries of origin, what they enabled was less a novel sense of
international engagement than a pleasurable quest for some absent past,
one of banal conflicts and ordinary romance long missing during the previous decades of warfare and destitution. But while early imported soap
operas were much enjoyed for their capacity to offer an escape from the
recent past of socialism, many home-grown dramas that came a few years
later started arousing a deep sense of nostalgia. In the late 1990s, when a
decent break had been established between the new condition of normalcy
and the previous period of collective hardship, the past started returning
to the small screen, serving as a common reference point to make sense of
present tensions.
A significant number of Vietnamese television dramas on national television in the late 1990s and early 2000s shared an aspiration to return to some
imagined past. These nostalgic dramas were as prominent as other dramas focussing on young people and their future. Famous dramas that were
deeply nostalgic, to name just a few, include Hanoian (‘Người Hà Nội’ 1996),
The People Around Me (‘Những Người Sống Bên Tôi’ 1996), Southern
Beauty (‘Người Đẹp Tây Đô’ 1996), The Southern Land (‘Đất Phương Nam’
1997), The Story of Mộc (‘Chuyện Nhà Mộc’ 1999), The Saving (‘Của Để
Dành’ 2000), An Unpaid Do-gooder (‘Người Vác Tù Và Hàng Tổng’ 2001),
The Falling Season (‘Mùa Lá Rụng’ 2001), The City Stories (‘Chuyện Phố
Phường’ 2002), and The Path of Life (‘Đường Đời’ 2004). In these dramas,
nostalgic sentiments were entwined with melodramatic narratives, taking
different places and times as their ideals. The yearning for a shared past was
sometimes attached to the old days of wars, subsidy, and collective farming. Often those were times of poverty and hardship, but never a lack of
hope and kindness. In other cases, nostalgia makes the countryside its lost
Nostalgia for the new oldness 43
home, where the fresh scent of newly harvested fields, the graceful roofs of
village temples, and the warmth of communal kinship are still untouched by
urban troubles. In dramas made explicitly for young audiences, the past is
often embodied by the pleasant figure of a wise and gentle grandparent, or a
­simple-hearted maid from the countryside. Nostalgia is also located within
an imagined past imbued with traditional values, as provoked by the charm
of ancient architecture or vintage costumes. In many cases, melodramatic
nostalgia was created by a combination of two or more of these elements
with different emphases. Against such nostalgic entanglement, these television dramas highlighted the complexity of urbanization and industrialization in the Reform era.
Outbursts of nostalgia are found in many post- and late-communist
­contexts. In China, there was a saturation of two major groups of nostalgic television drama in the 1990s: The first recalled the recent feudal era
(Zhu 2008); the second conveyed a sense of regret for the passing of the ‘red’
values of Maoist revolution (Qian 2008). Both types presented an a­ spiration
to return to a time of ‘strong leadership, idealism, and egalitarianism’, which
was no longer found in the late-socialist marketization (Qian 2008, p. 158). In
Eastern Europe, nostalgia was also a popular motif after the ­collapse of the
Soviet Union in 1991 (Todorova & Gille 2010). There are terms specifically
coined to name this nostalgic phenomenon in the post-Soviet world, such
as ‘Yugonostalgia’ in former Yugoslavia and ‘Ostalgie’ in East G
­ ermany.
Boym (2007, p. 7) concludes on the lingering atmosphere of nostalgia in the
post-Cold War world, ‘The twentieth century began with utopia and ended
with nostalgia. Optimistic belief in the future became outmoded, while nostalgia, for better or worse, never went out of fashion, remaining uncannily
contemporary’.
The popularity of nostalgic television dramas in Vietnam thus joined the
extended yearning for the past at the waning of socialist norms. But the
emerging sense of nostalgia in post-Reform Vietnam is not homogenous and
is deeply informed by local settings. Each of the Vietnamese dramas listed
provoked the melodramatic pleasure of being homesick in a different way
because each mobilized a distinctive network of people, events, and objects
to produce a specific way of problematizing the past, following a particular
rationality and responding to a certain problem in the present. The prominence and diversity of nostalgic sentiments in television dramas in ­Vietnam
after the Reform provoke several questions: Why did early Vietnamese
­television dramas focus so much on the past? How did television producers
reconceptualize the past to welcome some unexpected future? What were
the main ways of deploying people and objects to communicate the sense of
nostalgia? In the coming part, I examine two different Vietnamese dramas
to detangle the memorial practices performed by Vietnamese television in
the early years after the Reform.
Etymologically, nostalgia is a memorial form of belonging, an intimate
attachment to some old home in the past (from nostos, returning home, and
44
Nostalgia for the new oldness
algia, longing) (Davis 1). In other words, nostalgia is a homesick state associated with the sense of loss in both spatial and temporal identification.
­Although sounding nostalgically Greek, the word ‘nostalgia’ is a modern
term. It was first coined by a Swiss medical student in the late seventeenth
century to name a type of mental sickness (Boym 2007, p. 7). So, at least in
the Western world, nostalgia only became discursively formed as part of
modernity. Nostalgia serves as a constant companion of the modern sense
of progress, working as an essential mechanism of individual and collective
identification in coping with changes and disruptions engendered by modern ways of living. As a result, nostalgia becomes most acute when there are
major transformations in a society. In the words of Boym, ‘outbreaks of nostalgia often follow revolution’ (Boym 2007, p. 10). The relationship between
nostalgia and modernity in Boym’s theory resonates with Hobsbawm’s
argument about the invention of ‘tradition’ in response to modern upheavals (1992a). Our contemporary world of increasing global migration,
rapid transportation, and technological transfiguration indeed serves as a
frenzied site of nostalgia. As Appadurai (1996, p. 77) argues, nostalgia has
become a favourite theme of popular media, whereby the audiences are increasingly invited to long for what they never lost, and are offered a chance
to justify their present in the name of some memorial experience imposed
from outside.
If nostalgia is a sentiment that arises with sudden changes, particularly with novel perceptions of time and space, then television dramas in
post-­Reform Vietnam could well serve as a technology of nostalgia. The
Reform had engendered major transformations in the ways Vietnamese
people conducted their everyday lives, of which television dramas were a
new and ­i mportant element. Temporally, this genre arrived at a transitional
time when the old ways of living were fading and new ones were emerging. The nostalgic feeling embraced by many television dramas reflected
and gave meaning to a common sentiment among Vietnamese people when
­familiarizing themselves with new daily rituals, conflicts, and opportunities.
­Spatially, nostalgic dramas turned the domestic space into a much more intense point of connection between personal and collective belonging, where
the intimate feeling of being at home became increasingly indivisible from
the public sense of historical togetherness. At the arrival of television dramas, popular fantasy increasingly seeped into the way Vietnamese people
imagined and organized their private space of living, past and future.
In the previous chapter, I discussed how post-Reform television dramas
enabled a connection between the work of television as a technology of
domination and various strategies of self-making. As part of this governmental connection, nostalgia sentiments operated as a specific strategy of
self-formation. Memory is an important technology of the self. In his essay
‘Self Writing’, Foucault (1997) examines the self-caring function of hupomnēmata, a kind of journal in the Greco-Roman period where people wrote
about their memories to reflect upon their own lives. Memory, in this case,
Nostalgia for the new oldness 45
is not simply the recollection of what would otherwise be forgotten, but provides opportunities for the ‘reading, rereading, mediating, conversing with
oneself and with others’ (Foucault 1997, p. 210). Deleuze also stresses that
‘memory is the real name of the relation to oneself, or the affect on self by
self’ (1988, p. 107). Memory thus sets the structure of subjectivity in relation
to time, and is vital in the process of self-formation.
When nostalgia as a memorial technology of the self is built into the massscale mechanism of national television, it simultaneously assumes the dominating function of popular media. In the modern time, there are a number
of power apparatuses aiming at reprogramming collective memory because
as Foucault (1996, p. 92) argues, ‘if one controls people’s memory, one controls their dynamism’. Television, according to Foucault (1996, p. 92), is an
­effective memorial apparatus, where ‘people are shown not what they were,
but what they must remember having been’. In this case, ‘domination’ is understood not as mere coercion but as the capacity to overlay an immanent
grid of temporal belonging onto the lives of a large number of subjects. When
the feeling of nostalgia was widely distributed by popular dramas, it turned
television into a form of cultural government that regulated viewing subjects
through the blending of televised narratives and self-forming memories.
In her reading of Agamben, Foucault and Deleuze, Basu (2011, p. 34)
coins the term ‘memory dispositif ’ as a theoretical tool to unpack a specific ensemble of power relation that governs the way people remember their
own past. A dispositif is an arrangement, or to be more precise, a process
of arranging that involves the coming together and interacting of various
discursive elements to turn some specific past into an object or a means
of intervention. A memory dispositif produces an overall support for some
particular tendency that shapes the relationship between oneself and one’s
past, and between individual and collective memory. An analysis of a memory dispositif thus does not focus on historical genuineness or falsity, that is,
any kind of memorial essence, but attends to the dynamics of remembrance
as a form of cultural government that controls the formation of selves and
collectivities. Putting memory into dispositif enables more comprehensive
insights into the complex relations among the overlapping ‘domains of temporality, mediality and power’ (Basu 2011, p. 34) that are often separately
examined in studies of cultural memory.
The concept of memory dispositif is highly fruitful in exploring nostalgic
television dramas in Vietnam. This concept enables us to locate the specific
‘past’ embraced by each drama, to identify, differentiate, and make visible
the map of coexisting and sometimes rival memory dispositifs in a given
epoch. The dispositif-based approach also suggests a way of analyzing the
content of the television drama as itself a small memorial assemblage of
humans, objects, and events, which are governmentally deployed to meet
certain memorial demands in the present. In attending the deployment of
things alongside the narratives, we can reveal other dimensions of how nostalgia affects viewers that a pure focus on intentional ideological content
46 Nostalgia for the new oldness
might overlook. In the next section, I examine two specific memory dispositifs in two famous Vietnamese soap operas, Hanoian and The City Stories, to
reveal how the past is mobilized in different ways to give meaning and order
to post-Reform living.
Dispositif one: Hanoian and the bitter flavour of nostalgia
Hanoian, screened on Vietnam Television (VTV) in 1996, was one of the first
television dramas made by Vietnamese producers. With only three episodes,
this drama reflected the limited production capacity of Vietnamese television during the 1990s. The plot is based on a novel by Chu Lai, a well-known
military author who writes extensively on the topic of war and post-war
living. Hanoian tells the story of a soldier couple who fight together against
the Americans during the Second Indochina War. When peace is restored,
they live a placid life with a small daughter in a tiny home within an army
neighbourhood in Hanoi. The husband, Nam, is a plain and quiet man, who
battled bravely during the war and works diligently as an army engineer in
peacetime. The wife, Thảo, is an army doctor with womanly beauty and a
sweet voice. In the first few years after the war, poverty does not seem to
affect this small family, as their life is full of sparkling moments of joy and
care. But soon after the Reform, many friends of the couple start making
more money by seizing new business opportunities offered by the market
economy, while Nam and Thảo’s army salaries are inadequate to cope with
the increasing costs of food, tuition fees, and other daily necessities. Nam
works days and nights, taking extra jobs, but barely provides his family with
the basic needs. No longer able to bear the poverty, Thảo decides to take
on the burden of money-making. In her gentle but determined manner, she
quits her army job and leaves her family behind to go to East Germany
as exported labour. A few years later, Thảo brings back home a fortune
but no longer loves her army husband, who is now left behind with his soldier friends, his wartime memories, and the inferior feeling of not being
able to be the breadwinner at his own home. Thảo falls for a businessman,
who also fought on the battlefield but who has managed to grasp new opportunities to become rich in Eastern Europe. This love triangle ends after
a series of dramatic events, including the failed suicide of the new couple.
Torn ­between duty and desire, Thảo finally decides to remain in Hanoi with
her husband and daughter in their new big house, while her lover returns
to Europe. ­Hanoian has an open ending, leaving unanswered the question
of whether Thảo and Nam can find a way to reconciliation in their new
house. This ending, though not quite a happy one, is already modified from
the tragic ­ending of the original novel by Chu Lai, in which Thảo dies by
suicide, her lover becomes insane, and her husband continues his life in total despair. The changed ending in the drama, according to director Khải
Hưng, one of the producers of Hanoian, is ‘to meet the taste of Vietnamese audience, who always want a light and happy ending for the dramas on
Nostalgia for the new oldness 47
television’ (personal communication, 22 March 2014). The plot of the highly
tragic novel was thus softened to accommodate the banal nature of television drama as daily entertainment.
In Hanoian, the recent past of socialist wartime becomes the target of
nostalgia. This past is conjured through a network of veteran characters,
the dispersed locations of these characters after the Reform, the way
they organize their old and new houses, and the changing dress code.
The lead female character (Thảo) is shown discarding her old bicycle, her
plain army uniform, and her simple meals at home in favour of a taxi,
stylish Western dress, and fanciful restaurant treats. She also moves out
of the old and tiny home within the army neighbourhood into a big and
well-equipped house built by her new money from Eastern Europe. At
this moment of post-war dislocation, the couple realizes that the power
of money is much more d
­ evastating than the physical violence of warfare. When they were fighting for the nation, the couple shared peace
in their souls. But in peacetime, the only thing they can share is a cold
house without love. Many soldier friends of the couple are shown experiencing the same story of dislocation and loss, as they scatter all around
the country and oversea, stuck in their rumpled battledress and striving
to search for a refuge in peacetime. For many of these veterans, a peaceful shelter is more easily found in wartime nostalgia than in post-war
affluence.
When Thảo embarks on an adventure to Eastern Europe to seek a better
life, her shared past with her husband becomes the separation of their future. The irreconcilability between Thảo’s past and her future is reflected
in a conversation between Thảo and her younger sister before Thảo leaves
Vietnam:
Loan (Thảo’s younger sister): Dad
told me that you are going to
­Germany. Where do you find such courage?
Thảo: From the time I fought at Trường Sơn.
Loan (chuckling bitterly): But I think Trường Sơn and Germany are
two completely different battlefields!
The time spent fighting at Trường Sơn Mountain, a vital part of the legendary Ho Chi Minh Trail during the Second Indochina War, serves as Thảo’s
main source of spiritual strength when she starts on her new journey to a
foreign land to earn money. But Trường Sơn and Germany are indeed ‘completely different battlefields’, as predicted by the younger sister. In leaving
behind her husband and her old home, Thảo has inevitably chosen to pursue an unplanned future. The break-up with her husband upon her return
to ­Vietnam signifies Thảo’s refusal of their shared past and the divergence
of the couple’s future. The tragedy in Hanoian is that there cannot be any
happy ending in any of the characters’ relationships with the past. If one
keeps dwelling in the past, as seen in the passive figures of Nam and many
48
Nostalgia for the new oldness
of his friends, one inevitably fails to adapt to the new Reform present. But
when one chooses to abandon the past, one has to cope with an even more
tragic sense of loss and guilt, as represented by Thảo’s failed suicide and
her perpetual agony between romance and morals. Thảo has a future but
she fails to secure a compatible past, whereas Nam embraces a past without
a future. In the struggle between the past and the future, Thảo and Nam
are stuck in their present. The past, however glorious it was, has failed the
­couple in all possible ways.
The past nostalgically evoked in Hanoian is rooted in the history constructed by Vietnamese communist leaders in the 1960s and 1970s. In her
study of socialist historiography, the so-called ‘new history’ project (lịch
sử mới), Pelley (2002, p. 143) argues that after the national independence
in 1945, socialist virtues were systematically built upon a newly fabricated
past based on a pattern of peasant wars against foreign enemies and feudal
repression. In this war-centred history, soldiers were national heroes, and
the ultimate act of honour was to sacrifice one’s life for one’s country. This
history sought to legitimate the political leadership of the socialist regime in
the First and Second Indochina Wars by turning Northern leaders into natural heirs of the heroic tradition of the nation. Socialist leaders announced
that the act of sacrifice for the country was worthwhile because, as Ho Chi
Minh (2000, p. 108) promised at the peak of the war in 1966, a socialist
future of ‘more dignity and prosperity’ (đàng hoàng hơn, to đẹp hơn) would
follow the victory. Embodying this glorious utopia, a generation of communist fighters, like Thảo and Nam, had devoted their young lives to battling
imperialist enemies.
Such a future of ‘dignity and prosperity’ was never realized, at least not by
the socialist regime, and not for the heroes of the past. When the fighting at
Trường Sơn ended in 1975, the nation instantly fell into extreme poverty and
severe isolation from the world. In the 1980s, utopian dreams envisioned by
socialist leaders became a practical joke amidst the grim reality of a collapsing economy. When life started to improve thanks to market reforms,
the undesirable consequences of the remaining socialist governance became
even more evident. Rampant corruption, heavy-handed bureaucracy, and
widespread inequality generated a deep sense of crisis, demonstrating that
the Vietnamese party state had gradually lost legitimacy in both its past and
present. The old stories of wartime glory had no further appeal to people
in the post-war society, except as an unwanted residue of dogmatic ideology and lingering nostalgia. A whole generation of Northerners, who had
so willingly and unconditionally submitted their lives to the nationalist/
communist project, suddenly found themselves trapped between an unforgettable past and an unrealizable future. The heroic past was nostalgically
recalled only to evince how the glorious but naïve virtues of socialist ­utopia
become tragically vulnerable amidst new storms of business opportunities. The sense of nostalgia in Hanoian thus embraces a bitter flavour of
dissatisfaction.
Nostalgia for the new oldness 49
The exemplary bearers of this bitter nostalgia in Hanoian are veterans:
Those heroes of the past left struggling in the new market economy. Living
across eras, veterans clearly saw how the post-Reform transition disorganized
their lives. This theme of veterans’ nostalgia was quite popular in Vietnam in
the 1990s, as the Second Indochina War was only two decades previous. In
the much-analyzed short story The Retired General (‘Tướng Về Hưu’) by the
famous Vietnamese writer Nguyễn Huy Thiệp, wartime virtues are embraced
by an old general who is isolated in his own ­family ­because of his inability
to adapt to the new process of marketization ­(Zinoman 1994; Ho 2001). The
‘topsy-turvy state of post-war society’, as Ho (2001, p. 185) calls it, becomes
almost unbearable for the old hero. The general only b
­ ecomes happy when he
finally dies and is buried with his old comrades.
The stories of veterans, as depicted by the drama Hanoian and the short
story The Retired General, represent not only the bitterness of socialist soldiers but of a whole generation that had gone through the socialist
wars. ­Almost all Vietnamese families in the North had at least one family
­member, if not many, who was a soldier in the Second Indochina War. The
so-called ‘people’s war’ (chiến tranh nhân dân), meaning the war fought by
each and every citizen, had turned the whole population in the North into
war veterans, at least symbolically. The deep legacy of the socialist wars
upon the lives of ordinary people explained why Hanoian could easily blend
ordinary stories of private romance with national events to claim popular
fame in 1996.
The sense of nostalgia conjured by Hanoian hinged on the unwillingness,
or to be more precise, the inability to forget the past in order to engage in
some unexpected present and future. Such a bitter sense of nostalgia showed
a subtle affinity with anti-state sentiment towards the failure of the socialist
regime in fulfilling their nationalist oaths. This kind of anti-state nationalism in Hanoian, however, did not indicate a kind of political activism;
it was more about everyday dissatisfaction with economic uncertainty and
with the hypocritical lingering of socialist political leadership. Just as Thảo
and Nam find no way out of their tragic situation, the memory ­dispositif
conjured by Hanoian welcomes no future, or at least not a bright one.
A new ­tomorrow, after all, could not arrive upon an unwanted yesterday.
­post-­Reform life needs a new future of its own, which is precisely the one
targeted by The City Stories.
Dispositif two: The City Stories and the new oldness
The television drama The City Stories was as famous as Hanoian. Launched
later in 2002, The City Stories is much longer than Hanoian, with 22 ­episodes,
reflecting the improved capacity of VTV to produce truly ‘serial’ dramas. In
The City Stories, all family conflicts revolve around an old French colonial
house with a feudal altar. Located at the centre of Hanoi, this house is the
beloved home of a retired man and his blind daughter. The girl loves playing
50
Nostalgia for the new oldness
the piano, and when she is not into music, she spends most of her time making dolls, knitting clothes, and longing for the old days when her mother
was still alive. The peaceful lives of the old man and the innocent girl are
then disturbed by the return of the elder son, who comes home after years
of doing business in Eastern Europe. The greedy son tries all possible ways
to force his father and his younger sister to transfer their share of the house
to him, so that he can turn the house into his private international business
headquarters.
While all other inheritors of the house gradually agree to sell their share
of the house to the son, the old man and his blind daughter consistently
refuse to leave, regardless of how much money the son is willing to pay.
For the father, the house is so culturally and spiritually valuable that no
money could buy it. Generations of his family have lived there. The ancient
altar at the centre of the house, coated in golden lacquer and clouded by
incense, still bears witness to the spiritual existence of his honourable ancestors. The prospect of family heritage being destroyed by dirty money
breaks the old man’s heart. For the girl, the house is her only refuge. She has
been completely isolated from the real world since she became blind at the
age of 12 after a severe illness. She knows every corner of the house, and she
surrounds herself with memories of her deceased mother and the peaceful
melodies of her happy childhood. Unable to see, the girl would be completely lost outside her own home. The old man and the blind girl resolutely
refuse to sell the house to the son because, for these two people, money is
not everything.
In a desperate attempt to remove his father and sister, the elder son asks
a friend to seduce the blind girl, hoping that the girl would sell her share of
the house in order to move out after marriage. Devastated by his own son’s
behaviour, the father eventually surrenders when his daughter also wants
to abandon him in his struggle to protect the house. The drama ends with
the son failing to achieve his evil purpose because at the last minute, his
friend turns to help the old man and his blind girlfriend. This accomplice is
transformed into a good man by the girl’s innocent love and the old man’s
silent wisdom. The old man and his daughter finally live in peace in their
beloved home, while the evil son returns to Eastern Europe without any of
his business plans fulfilled.
The City Stories, like Hanoian, presents moral dissatisfaction with
a post-Reform society centred on corruptive wealth. Evil money from
­Eastern Europe was a common pattern in Vietnamese television dramas
in the first decade after the Reform because the main source of wealth
in the North during the 1980s and 1990s was from those returning from
­Eastern ­Europe, where they had studied and worked. The City Stories, however, ­fundamentally differs from Hanoian in its nostalgic construction of
the past. ­Absolutely no trace of warfare is found in all 22 episodes, and
not a single character is soldier, past or present. The father was a retired
­‘cultural officer’ (cán bộ văn hoá); the deceased mother was a piano teacher;
Nostalgia for the new oldness 51
their relatives are either small businesspeople or leaders of state enterprises.
The heroes in The City Stories are no longer fighters at Trường Sơn battlefield, but cultured people who persistently embrace peace and promote
cultural sustainability. Here we see an entirely new memorial disposition of
humans, objects, and events, which celebrates a different ‘yesterday’ from
that ­represented by Hanoian. All the nostalgic details of the house, such as
its architectural style, the exotic altar, the vintage furniture, the costumes of
its inhabitants, and their way of living, are carefully portrayed to be distinctively ‘Hanoian’. The house acts as a ‘site of memory’, to use the influential
term of Nora (1989), where one can still find the elegant essence of Hanoi,
the capital city and cultural hub of Vietnam, amidst the turbulent economic
transformations of the Reform era.
Many elements in this new memory dispositif could only be publicly honoured after the Reform. At least from the 1950s to the 1980s, anything related to feudalism or royalty, such as an ancient altar coated in red lacquer
and golden patterns worshipped in The City Stories, would carry a strong
connotation of either ‘backward’ or ‘reactionary’ values, according to the
socialist world view (Malarney 2002, p. 80). In The City Stories, this is no
longer the case because the ancient altar is turned into a cultural source
of spiritual power that deserves spectacular celebration. Another important element in this new memory dispositif is the colonial house, which is
no longer a hostile symbol of the slavery past under French domination.
Instead, the house stands firmly with dignity throughout the drama as an
ideal location of authentic culture, protecting its righteous inhabitants from
the corrupting power of money.
The colonial house and its traditional altar are less a location of postwar vulnerability than a new symbol of cultural power. Amidst the real
estate fever in Hanoi in the early 2000s, the house itself is one of the most
expensive assets in the capital city. All dramatic conflicts are centred on
the house precisely because this house simultaneously represents both financial and cultural wealth. Virtuous but vulnerable subjects of post-war
society, represented by the old man and his blind daughter, are physically
guarded by the solid building and morally supported by the worshipped
ancestors. In one of the conversations between the old man and his daughter, the former says, ‘If your brother had known to appreciate the traditional values carried within this old house, he would have never been
spoiled by money’. In this sense, the colonial architecture blended with
feudal authenticity resembles neither the poor tiny apartment of Thảo and
Nam, nor the new empty house built by Thảo’s new money. In other words,
the celebration of the colonial house in The City Stories is not a bitter denunciation of money as depicted in Hanoian, but serves as a moral lesson
about money without cultural responsibilities. When heroic socialism fails
to respond to the demand of a market economy, pre-­socialist ­values, those
from the feudal and colonial eras, are restored and in many ways reinvented to legitimate post-Reform money.
52
Nostalgia for the new oldness
This kind of neo-traditional ethics is reminiscent of the business ethics
based on cultural nationalism emerging in many Asian nations at the arrival
of globalization, typically in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, ­Malaysia, and
Taiwan. Ong (1997, p. 342) calls this a ‘self-Orientalist’ strategy, in which
Asian actors themselves, rather than the Western colonizers once analyzed
by Edward Said, celebrate and essentialize the authenticity and tradition
of the Orient. The self-Orientalist strategy aims at legitimating Asian capitalist activities on multiple levels. At the local and national levels, this rationality smooths away conflicts of interest among various groups in the
name of some shared cultural origin. At the global level, this rationality
seeks to legitimate Asian actors in the global market in the name of cultural
authenticity.
In The City Stories, the self-Orientalist tendency is best illustrated
through the character of Mrs An, the blind girl’s older cousin. Taking a
secondary role, Mrs An is a positive combination of the villain son and
the blind daughter. She occasionally turns up to solve family conflicts, and
­always appears as a successful female entrepreneur whose lucrative business
is complemented by her sincere appreciation of national traditions. Phạm
Thanh Phong (personal communication, 7 March 2014), the director and
scriptwriter of The City Stories, explains why he created such a character:
Mrs An is just a supporting role, but I think she represents a kind of
dream, some sort of an idealized figure I guess. My idea is that in order
to preserve culture and to promote traditional and precious values, one
needs both a good heart and money. You can’t do good things simply by
having a good will.
The director constructs the figure of Mrs An as a model of business ethics:
Her money is accompanied by social responsibility. As Mrs An ­sustainably
develops her business consistently with her Vietnamese conscience, she
is exemplary of how capitalism should meet cultural nationalism. The
fictional character of Mrs An in The City Stories is strikingly similar to
Hien, a real-life businesswoman in an ethnographic work by Leshkowich.
As Leshkowich (2006, p. 297) observes, Hien embraces traditional values
of Buddhism because these values protect her ‘from moral panics about
­capitalist individualism and materialism’. The fictional case of Mrs An and
the real example of Hien demonstrate how traditional culture is revitalized
to ethically make sense of post-Reform money-making activities and to balance contradictory logics between individual and collective interests.
The small memory dispositif in The City Stories and its self-Orientalist
strategy take part in an extended dispositif that promotes national traditions
and cultural authenticity in post-Reform Vietnam, which involves a ­diverse
and complex set of practices, both discursive and non-discursive. The recent
proliferation of religious activities is a typical manifestation of this traditionalist tendency (see, for example, Malarney 2007; Salemink 2008). Vietnam
Nostalgia for the new oldness 53
also engages more enthusiastically in the promotion of cultural heritage,
typically in glamorous celebrations of feudal traditions in the Hue festival
and the quest for the world heritage recognition from the United ­Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) (Long 2003;
Salemink 2007; Di Giovine 2009; Shannon 2009; Logan 2010; Meeker 2010).
Under the broad umbrella of ‘cultural identity’, the politics of traditionalism
in Vietnam is a contesting process. Actors such as local artisans, provincial
authorities, and national leaders all pursue different agendas that sometimes
work well together and other times diverge between different layers of economic and cultural benefits. Within this new and complex setup of m
­ emories
and traditions, the logic behind the nostalgic sentiment of The City Stories
can be read as a strategy to legitimate ­Vietnamese subjects as representatives
of both national culture and business, or the business of culture.
Regarding the self-Orientalist strategy embraced by The City Stories,
however, the appearance of the colonial building becomes somewhat contradictory. The exotic altar coated with feudal patterns is firmly protected
within a French villa, a non-Vietnamese item. This juxtaposition is quite unusual if one considers how Vietnamese nationalism once depended so heavily on anti-colonial discourses. Within these discourses, a French house
would surely be seen as a symbol of colonial enemy instead of an idealized
home for cultural nationalism. The question provoked by such an odd constellation of memorial objects is: How far into the past can one claim Oriental charm, or, in this specific case of The City Stories, to celebrate something
as ‘authentically Vietnamese’?
The answer is clearly evinced in this drama. The colonial legacy is already
an organic part of the Oriental heritage. Although the house was previously
a symbol of colonialism, it is now a beloved home that embeds a unique
fusion of Vietnamese and Western cultures. I asked the director of The City
Stories why he chose a colonial house as the locus of national heritage, when
other options appeared more ‘authentic’, such as the ancient native tube
house (nhà phố cổ) in the old quarter of Hanoi. The director Phạm Thanh
Phong (personal communication, 7 March 2014) replied,
Practically, we need a large house to put the cameras. The colonial house
is a much better place to film the drama than the tiny and dark ancient
house … Symbolically, I think all the cultural traditions that we could
preserve now have already been enriched by French culture. When we
think about Hanoi, we often think about the ancient tube house, but we
also love the green windows of colonial architecture. The ancient and
the colonial quarters are all blended into a Việt spirit.
Clearly, a spacious and well-lit colonial house suited the cameras better; it
also served as a much nicer place for the son in The City Stories to locate his
international business headquarters. On the contrary, an ancient tube house
in the old quarter of Hanoi is typically dark, tiny, and crowded, with several
54
Nostalgia for the new oldness
families squeezed in. These tunnel-like ancient houses surely represented
traditional culture but failed to exude the sense of cosmopolitan luxury represented by the colonial building. The French Colonial Quarter, as Surborg
(2006, p. 245) notes, was becoming ‘the new centre of Hanoi’ because it was
‘demonstrating the world class cultural achievements of the former colonialists’. Only the colonial house could produce a true sense of wealth and
success in the post-Reform context when Vietnamese businesspeople were
trying to reintegrate into the global market.
In order to bring the colonial house into a closer contact with ‘traditional
values’, the producers of The City Stories had to artificially ‘add’ the feudal
altar into the colonial architecture. The altar was filmed separately in another place, and the editing made it feel like the altar was on the top floor of
the French building. The producers of The City Stories deliberately mixed
different objects together to fit their imagination of a proper Hanoian home:
A blend of royal and colonial heritage, with no troublesome from warfare
and socialism. Director Phong (personal communication, 7 March 2014)
justified, ‘I know the altar looked a bit odd when it appeared in the French
building because it was filmed in a different house. But that’s alright (cũng
không sao), as it enhances the cultural thickness embedded in this house’.
The director of this drama seemed quite comfortable with the mixture
­because it perfectly symbolized his belief in money with a cultural purpose.
Regarding the role of architecture in forming memory, Guggenheim (2009)
argues that buildings as visible and material elements of memory networks
acquire an important function that is much more complicated than mere fossilized pieces of history. Houses as ‘objects outside the remembering persons
or collectives may act as catalysts for the production and interpersonal adjustment of memories’. The same buildings as actants in different memory
­networks are ‘mutable immobiles’ that help to construct plural, if not contesting perceptions of times (Guggenheim 2009, p. 49). This is precisely the case of
the colonial building in The City Stories. Once located within a new network
of feudal objects and cultured people, this colonial house is no longer operated
as a hostile symbol of colonialism but rather as a space of nostalgic yearning
for a wealthier future. The arrangement of an altar and a colonial house as
symbols of national culture may have been odd in the previous socialist world
view but is completely appropriate amidst the emerging economy of cultural
heritage. The colonial building in The City Stories thus reflects how this object
can productively support more than one way of remembering the past.
Similar cases of colonial incarnation can be found in the emerging tourist
business in Vietnam (Kenedy & Williams 2001; Michaud & Turner 2006). In
Sa Pa, the mountainous province famed for its ethnic charm in the North
of Vietnam, local authorities have recently celebrated the 100th year of
tourism by tracking the province’s history back to the first colonial settlers. These colonizers are now transformed into the first ‘tourists’ of the
land (Michaud & Turner 2006). They are no longer alien invaders often denounced by official historiography but genuine appropriators of universal
Nostalgia for the new oldness 55
nature and human beauty. In this regard, the colonial past is turned into an
evidence of global engagement, allowing the exotic appeal of Sa Pa to be
part of the international business of tourism.
In her analysis of nostalgia, Boym (2007) differentiates between what she
terms ‘restorative’ and ‘reflective’ nostalgia. The first type of nostalgia exerts a conservative force, demanding a rebuild of some ‘true’ home of purity
and stability. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, aims at building a
creative space of belonging and loss without necessarily concerning itself
with a return to any original home. Boym (2007, pp. 13–5) stresses that the
first type of nostalgia is strongly related to the recent re-emergence of nationalist and religious movements, while reflective nostalgia is more about
an act of individual creativity and irony upon the existing ruins of the past.
The nostalgic sentiments embraced by both Hanoian and The City Stories
fall into the first category of nostalgia because both dramas aroused a kind
of homesickness that targeted the restoration of stability and morality. But
Hanoian and The City Stories presented very different shades of the restoration project, demonstrating how the memorial formation of the memorial
stability is itself a plural and contested process. Hanoian is mainly about
retrospective reflection, as this television drama is driven by bitter suspicion
about the future. By contrast, The City Stories is highly prospective and
creative, aimed at restructuring the past based on the new requirement of
post-Reform living. Whereas Hanoian focussed on the failure of an old utopia, The City Stories built a new one, only this new utopia found its location
in a newly invented past instead of an idealized future.
At this point, it is important to return to the key feature of television drama
as a genre of private pleasure instead of a deliberate project of nationalization. The sense of nostalgia aroused by both Hanoian and The City Stories
was intrinsically linked with different ways of imagining the national past,
but such national formation was simultaneously a process of home-building
and self-making. In Hanoian, the tragic story of Thảo and Nam let viewers
reflect upon the stories of themselves being participants of recent national
vicissitudes. The couple’s dislocation from a s­ ocialist collective apartment
into a private house was first and foremost a journey of home-building that
many Vietnamese people experienced after the ­Reform, including my own
family. The City Stories, in a very different manner, also seduced viewers
into a melodramatic world of family conflicts, where viewers were offered
a chance to locate themselves within the changing context of post-Reform
marketization and the emerging economy of cultural authenticity. These
two television dramas thus enabled what Rofel (1995, p. 308) terms ‘the
domestication of the nation’, or the blending of national belonging with
personal living. Though taking divergent paths, both dramas connected
personal memory with national stories to offer different ways of living the
present and anticipating the future. Thanks to the work of melodramatic
imagination, the two dramas enabled the formation of the nation to work ‘at
a distance’ through memorial reflection.
56 Nostalgia for the new oldness
The interesting paradox is that Hanoian recalls the socialist past to implicitly blame socialist ideology. Political ideals embraced in the past cannot
help Thảo, Nam, and their veteran friends to find their place in the contemporary world. By contrast, The City Stories actually evades all political matter to create a purely cultural past. Without touching the ‘sensitive’ question
of socialist morality, The City Stories is actually more compatible with the
party state’s economic ambitions and their post-Reform advocacy of the
­so-called ‘national cultural identity’ (bản sắc văn hoá dân tộc).
The two memory dispositifs presented by Hanoian and The City Stories
are not mutually exclusive. By contrast, just as the authors of the Hanoian
present the failure of the socialist past, the producers of The City Stories
identify how the leading characters seek a better future through a ‘better
yesterday’. Though presenting different memorial practices, both dramas
connect personal memory with national stories to perform different forms
of cultural government in the present. Both dramas translate abstract
­processes of privatization, marketization, and global integration into the
question of how to build a happy home in the post-Reform times. In reaching beyond the macro narrative controlled by the party state to attend to the
micro details of ordinary life, these Vietnamese television dramas open up
new spaces whereby viewers’ memorial conduct can be governed from afar.
3
From socialist moralism to
market ethics
A whole new range of television programmes soon arrived in V
­ ietnam after
the impressive success of soap operas. In the late 1990s and ­throughout the
2000s, game shows, quiz shows, talk shows, lifestyle programmes, and reality shows were quickly introduced, and within just a few years, they became
a major component of Vietnamese television content. All of these genres
were completely novel experiences to V
­ ietnamese viewers, who had previously only watched news, current affairs, and dramas. The diversification
of programmes in the late 1990s reflected the dynamic ­transformation of
post-Reform television as part of cultural globalization.
Being a new fabric of everyday rhythm in Vietnam post-Reform, these
newly arrived shows are best understood as what Bonner (2003) terms ‘ordinary television’, whose main concerns are practical problems of banal
living and the majority of participants are ‘ordinary’ people. The advent
and ­burgeoning of ordinary television in Vietnam have attracted almost
no attention from media scholars, with so far only a few studies ­exploring
­singular shows as a manifestation of post-Reform cultural changes (Bui 2012;
­McAllister & Luckman 2015). Perhaps the uneventful nature of ordinary
television makes it less worthwhile as an object of research, ­particularly
in the context of Vietnamese media being understood mainly as a political instrument of the party state. With no direct relevance to problems of
corruption, dissent, or censorship, topics that have long occupied academic
concerns of media practices in Vietnam, ordinary television silently alters
the post-­Reform television landscape without changing the way the world
­ ietnamese media.
understands V
Such a lack of interest in new developments of Vietnamese television
deserves to be addressed, especially in exploring the connection between
popular media and the nationalizing process. In her analysis of ordinary
television and the nation, Bonner (2003, p. 186) asserts that ordinary television plays a representative and constitutive role in national formation. In
her words, ‘Without ordinary television a very different image of the nation
would be available’. In this chapter, I trace the development of ordinary television in Vietnam in the late 1990s and throughout the 2000s, which more
58 From socialist moralism to market ethics
or less reflects the current state of Vietnamese television. The review is brief
and mainly serves as a context for later chapters on the relationship between
national formation and selected ordinary shows. Upon the historical analysis of ordinary television in Vietnam, I emphasize how practical ethics based
on self-reflection has gradually prevailed in post-Reform television programmes, replacing the older discourse of socialist moralism centred on the
policing role of state institutions. This replacement has led to a more plural,
complex, and changing process, whereby multiple techniques, actors, and
forms of expertise from both state and non-state factors become entwined in
the government of individual and collective identities in Vietnam.
SV’96 and the arrival of ordinary shows
Bonner (2003, p. 32) uses the term ‘ordinary television’ to cover a wide
range of television programmes, the content of which ‘calls on ordinary,
everyday concerns and patterns of behaviour, using them, furthermore,
not just as topics but as guides to style, appearance and behaviour’. The
first important feature of ordinary television is its mundane topics, that is,
‘everyday concerns and patterns of behaviour’. This characteristic means
that ordinary television leads to thorough inclusion of everyday life into
televisual ­content. In this respect, ordinary television resembles television
drama, with the key difference being that the everyday life represented by
ordinary television is non-fictional. Further, ordinary genres routinely provide practical guidance for daily living instead of melodramatic plots of
family romance.
Ordinary television often, but not always, presents amateur participants
who have no professional connection with the television industry. People
appear on television to perform their distinctive ordinariness, ‘to project a
personality’, in ways that are either entertaining or useful to viewers, and
­often both (Bonner 2003, p. 53). Other amateur participants in ordinary
shows include the studio audience, who become part of the show through
their reactions; laughter; applause; and occasionally their active involvement, if invited. Many ordinary shows also attract viewers at home to vote,
phone in, or ask questions. On a voluntary basis, ordinary participants
­contribute their unpaid labour for the television industry. The inclusion
of ordinary people also helps reduce the distance between viewers in their
­living rooms and the people appearing on television.
Another characteristic of ordinary television is related to its style, which
includes the adoption of conversational language, the presence of a host/
presenter, and a high degree of dependence on studio-based production.
Such a style allows ordinary television to present ‘an illusion of normality’
in the sense that ordinary programmes are centred on casual chats within
an environment of homely comfort (Bonner 2003, p. 32). These style features
enhance the amusement provided by ordinary shows while still maintaining
a relatively low production cost.
From socialist moralism to market ethics
59
The concept of ‘ordinary television’ is highly useful to unpack the arrival of a diverse group of new television programmes in Vietnam in the
late 1990s. This concept allows us to identify distinctive features of the new
­programmes as part of the extended emergence of everydayness in post-­
Reform Vietnam. As I discuss in further chapters, in the specific case of
Vietnam, being ‘ordinary’ might indicate a local form of political valence,
in the paradoxical sense that ordinariness is seen as politically benign in
comparison to heavily politicized content such as news or documentary. It
is thus more likely for ordinary programmes to enable their own networks
of power relation that are less monitored by the censoring system. Other
concepts, such as ‘lifestyle television’ or ‘light entertainment’, might cover
a similar range of programmes but are less fruitful in tracing the ‘ordinary’ dimension of television that is highly relevant to the study of banal
nationalism.
On Vietnamese national television, typical characteristics of ordinary television were first to be found in the show SV’96, which was broadcast on the
channel VTV3 every second weekend in 1996. The name SV was simply an
abbreviation of Sinh Viên, which literally means ‘student’ and which reflects
the show’s key participants. This game show featured student teams from
universities in a nationwide tournament, including comedies, quiz shows,
public speeches, and talent quests. The main themes were common aspects
of university life, such as love, exam, stipend (or the lack of it), naughtiness,
and social responsibilities. Traces of socialist youth movements were still
evident because each show discussed a highly didactic topic that commonly
appeared in state-run student campaigns, such as ‘Students and HIV’,
­‘Students and Social Evils’, and ‘Students and Environmental Protection’.
Still, the key impression left by SV’96 was less about its content than the
way that content was conveyed through vivid youthful personalities. In
other words, it was not the ‘what’ but the ‘how’ of this programme that
turned SV’96 into an extremely popular television show. Major newspapers,
such as Thanh Niên, Tuổi Trẻ, and Tiền Phong, all considered SV’96 to be
an important and exciting cultural event for youth, deserving detailed coverage after each show. Key words about this game show that ran through
many newspaper reports in 1996 were ‘intelligent’ (trí tuệ), ‘humorous’
(hài hước), ‘witty’ (dí dỏm), ‘fresh’ (tươi trẻ), ‘charming’ (có duyên), ‘creative’
(sáng tạo), and ‘energetic’ (sôi nổi). Most newspapers skipped discussion of
the ­pedagogic topics to emphasize the joy and excitement that the game
show generated, something rarely found in Vietnamese television in the
1990s. SV’96 was also famous for the size of the audience it attracted. As
there was no television studio that suited the production of television game
shows at that time, SV’96 was filmed in university halls, theatres, or stadiums. ­According to an estimation provided by the Thanh Niên newspaper, a
total of about 300,000 people, mostly students from participating universities, came to watch this programme being taped throughout 1996 (Nhóm
Phóng Viên Thế Giới Trẻ 1997). There is no available data about viewers at
60
From socialist moralism to market ethics
home, but in my discussion of television with numerous Vietnamese people,
SV’96, together with The Rich Also Cry, is undoubtedly one of the most
remembered television shows in Vietnam.
SV’96 was much enjoyed not only for its amusing participants but
also for its special host, Lại Văn Sâm, the first presenter of Vietnamese
­e ntertainment shows. With SV’96, Sâm achieved an iconic national reputation overnight. Previously, viewers had only seen news and current
affairs presented by talking heads who mostly read scripts instead of conversing with the audience. Former television presenters also restrained
themselves as much as possible from any excess of personality. By contrast, Sâm talked in a more or less impromptu manner, made spontaneous jokes, and laughed freely. His ‘chatterbox’ style reflects Bonner’s
observation that the role of the presenter in ordinary shows is to mediate
the distance between the beyond-ordinariness of a television event and
the ordinariness of viewers’ daily lives. The performance of ordinary students and the host in SV’96 also fits perfectly with Holland’s description
of ordinary television as ‘a flow of action on the screen which is light
and entertaining, mildly informative and involves lots of chatter, lots of
personalities, some music and plenty of laughs’ (Holland 2000, p. 131).
The involvement of non-professional participants and the conversational
style of presentation made SV’96 the first typical ordinary programme on
Vietnamese small screens.
In the late 1990s, the emergence of non-fictional ‘ordinariness’ in SV’96
should not be taken for granted: It was something that Vietnamese television had strived to achieve. Ordinary television transformed Vietnamese
television practice in at least three major respects: Production capacity,
content pluralization, and profit generation. In terms of production, SV’96
began the success of Vietnamese television in filling increased broadcast
hours with in-house programmes. In Chapter 1, I mentioned that in 1994
Vietnamese television producers started making their own television dramas at a low cost, on a regular basis, and for the purpose of entertainment. But drama producers were barely able to cover two weekly sessions
dedicated to Vietnamese dramas, which were Art and Culture on Sunday
and Dramas on Friday Evening (‘Phim Truyện Tối Thứ Sáu’) (Tô 1995).
The lack of domestic programmes became particularly acute in 1996 at the
launching of VTV3, the first entertainment channel in Vietnam. VTV3 was
initiated in 1994 as a subgroup of dramas and music programmes, which
was dovetailed into VTV1, the main channel for news and current affairs.
From 1994 to 1996, the VTV3 subgroup accounted for two hours on weekdays and four hours on Sundays. When launched as an independent channel in 1996, VTV3 quickly increased its broadcasting time to ten hours on
weekdays and twelve hours on Sundays, which led to a severe shortage of
programmes.
In an interview on the seventeenth birthday of VTV3 in 2013, Lại Văn
Sâm (Cà Phê Sáng Cuối Tuần 2013), the host of SV’96 and the head of VTV3,
From socialist moralism to market ethics
61
recalled the struggle to find enough content to cover the increased airing
hours of VTV3:
Still engraved in my mind is the memory of our early days, when I and
director An Ninh went to Ho Chi Minh City to meet various music
production companies, one after another, to tell them that we wanted
to introduce their products on television. These companies then gave us
their CDs with a lot of songs and music shows, from which we ­selected
to broadcast. We also needed more television dramas, and director
Trịnh Lê Văn took the responsibility to find enough dramas to air.
SV’96 was the only show that was really produced by us to prepare
for the launching of VTV3. After that we soon had the game show
­Interville (‘Trò Chơi Liên Tỉnh’), if you still remember. Other programs
were, well, mainly ‘sourced’ (khai thác) from other places. We use the
term ‘sourcing’ euphemistically, but to put it bluntly, we actually ‘stole’
programs to have enough shows to air.
This memory reveals the extremely poor production capacity of Vietnamese
television in 1996. We should note that during the 1990s, ‘sourcing’ programmes without official permission from international and local sources
was of no serious problem because the concept of ‘copyright’ was not yet a
notable part of legal and public discourses. ‘Stealing’ became more problematic in the 2000s when more profit was generated from the circulation of
cultural products and particularly after the official participation of ­Vietnam
in the Bern Convention in 2004. The lack of copyright awareness in the
late 1990s helped VTV3 to ‘collect’ enough content to maintain the newly
launched entertainment channel.
Ordinary shows emerged as a timely solution to VTV3’s crisis of content
shortage. The success of SV’96 ushered in a whole new era in which Vietnamese television could produce a rich diversity of entertainment programmes
in a stable and controllable manner. In 1997, VTV3 started recruiting young
television producers to boost the production of game shows and talk shows.
Besides developing specialized teams, VTV3 also built new studios designed
specifically for game shows. Thanks to these changes, ordinary shows soon
became an important part of Vietnamese television at the national level and
spread rapidly to provincial stations. In Ho Chi Minh City, the development
of game shows and talk shows happened more or less in parallel with the
expansion of VTV3 in the North.
Ordinary television quickly led to a much-enlarged range of possible content that reached far beyond what had previously been offered by news and
drama. Bonner (2003, p. 43) argues that ordinary television is different from
news and drama because of its excessive ‘uneventfulness’, meaning its intensified focus on the triviality and practicality of daily life. This expanded
range of televisable content was certainly convenient for Vietnamese television under the burden of increased airing hours. After the debut of SV’96,
62
From socialist moralism to market ethics
other ordinary shows gradually brought numerous mundane aspects of
daily life onto the small screen, and within just a few years the inclusion of
amateur participants became the norm. Student quizzes, household tips,
tourist advice, and youth dating were key topics of early Vietnamese ordinary shows. Even in the franchised formats that flooded onto Vietnamese television in the 2000s, the main concern was still highly relevant to
Vietnamese life. ­Successful games such as Wheel of Fortune (‘Chiếc Nón
Kỳ Diệu’), Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (‘Ai Là Triệu Phú’), and The
Price is Right (‘Hãy Chọn Giá Đúng’) were all localized to adapt them to the
Vietnamese culture, history, and lifestyle. Reality shows like Vietnam Idol
(‘Thần Tượng Âm Nhạc Việt), Vietnam’s Next Top Model (‘Người Mẫu Việt
Nam’), Vietnam Amazing Race (‘Cuộc Đua Kỳ Thú’), Master Chef (‘Vua Đầu
Bếp’), and The Voice (‘Giọng Hát Việt’) also incorporated the Vietnamese
context into global formats by showcasing mundane conflicts and competition among ordinary Vietnamese participants. So if soap operas started the
banal and regular practice of watching television in Vietnam, then ordinary
shows took a step further by filling the entire day with games, talks, and talent contests. Ordinary concerns became the key content on the small screen
and the rhythm of daily life is now fully marked by television. Morning,
lunch, afternoon, and evening shows are entwined with the work–leisure
schedule of common viewers. Soon Vietnamese television became the most
important provider of popular entertainment, which exists in parallel with
the programmes dedicated to state-controlled political propaganda.
The improvement of production capacity and the diversification of content were mainly motivated by an increased dependence on advertisement
revenue, which was another key transformation enabled by ordinary television. Before the arrival of ordinary shows, national and provincial television
mainly relied on state funding. This subsidiary mechanism was not only a
burden to the state but also a major constraint for television producers in
initiating their own programmes. The popular success of television dramas
and ordinary television allowed Vietnamese television to turn to advertising as an alternative source of income, and this income was soon greater
than, and replaced, state subsidy. In an interview with Tuổi Trẻ newspaper
in 2005, Trần Đăng Tuấn, then the vice director of Vietnam Television, confirmed that he established VTV3 and advocated the making of entertainment programmes in this channel for two main reasons: First, to meet the
high demand of Vietnamese viewers for entertainment content and, second,
to increase funding for television and reduce the burden on the state (Lan
2005). These aims obviously came as a pair because the more viewers that
VTV3 could serve by its new entertainment programmes, the more advertisement revenue VTV3 would generate. According to Trần Đăng Tuấn,
in 2005, VTV3 earned 80 per cent of the total advertisement revenue for
­Vietnam Television. This new financial resource was not only used to develop
more shows for VTV3, but also redistributed to improve VTV1 (the channel for news and current affairs) and VTV2 (the channel for education and
From socialist moralism to market ethics
63
science) (Lan 2005). From around mid-2000s, VTV became fully independent from state funding thanks to its increased advertisement earning. Other
television networks, particularly in the South, followed a similar trajectory
to VTV, in which all major transformations in production capacity were
driven by the commercialization of the entertainment sector.
The limitation of the state-centred approach
As mentioned earlier, the proliferation of popular television has attracted
little attention from Vietnamese studies scholars. However, there have been
several works focussing on the post-Reform emergence of the middle class
and their daily lifestyle. Some of these works give the media a constitutive
role in guiding daily urban living (Pettus 2003, pp. 109–38; Drummond
2004; Hien 2012; Earl 2013). The most recent and explicit account of ordinary media is Earl’s study of Vietnamese magazines for women, which argues that Vietnamese women’s magazines are still largely controlled by the
party state’s ideological agenda, despite the increase of the commercialized
content. As the title of this work claims to use the case of women’s magazine
to represent ‘Vietnamese media’, the author implies that readers can generalize the particular case of Vietnamese women’s magazines to other types
of media. Earl’s study, again, embraces that a state-centred approach allows
an investigation of the ideological manipulation from above but overlooks
the new and complex networks of local actors that no longer take the state
as their core. A brief review of Earl’s study is helpful to elaborate my defence
of a more sophisticated view on the popular media landscape in Vietnam.
Earl is concerned mainly with comparing major themes covered by the
magazines and those promoted by the state. A focus on content allows Earl
to conclude that key topics in contemporary women’s magazines in Vietnam
fit neatly to the state’s agenda, and thus that magazines mainly advocate
the state’s manipulative world view. Earl (2013, p. 85) therefore maintains
that the positive impact of the Reform upon Vietnamese media has been
‘overstated’. In her words, ‘women’s magazines demonstrate that the values
conveyed in the Vietnamese print lifestyle media continue to converge with
the State’s world-view’ (Earl 2013, p. 86). By using the word ‘continue’, Earl
implies the persistence of the pre-Reform authoritarian model in which the
state used the media as mere instruments of its political agenda.
Earl provides a number of instances in which women’s magazines mainly
serve as reflectors of state ideology. On the topic of household improvement,
for example, trivial stories such as ‘a quiz on partner compatibility’, ‘ten tips
on parenting’, ‘six steps to teaching a child to save money’, and ‘household
tips such as how to clean a refrigerator’ are seen to converge with socialist
ideals of family virtue (2013, p. 94). The problem of gender roles is another
example. The magazines often depict successful women against their family
background. Such representations indicate that Vietnamese women, however professionally successful they may be, continue to be tied to domestic
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From socialist moralism to market ethics
duties. Earl (2013, p. 90) concludes that ‘the portrayals of Vietnamese women
… place them in non-productive roles at the centre of family life, in line with
the state’s focus on producing quality children’. So, despite their glamorous
image and their new spirit of consumerism, Vietnamese magazines fail to
present ‘alternative lifestyles’ that can resist the idealized images of womanhood long advocated by the state (Earl 2013, p. 95).
Earl’s article demonstrates a lasting assumption made by many media
scholars about the determining role of the state in policing Vietnamese
media. In such studies, the state is assumed to be a centralized and all-­
powerful body that possesses an omnipresent and autonomous capacity
for censoring political, social, and cultural practices, especially those
related to the media. In Earl’s explanation, the post-Reform state has
successfully expanded its control over the proliferation of practical and
­i ntimate ­d iscourses in lifestyle media, including the way one cleans one’s
refrigerator. Such a vision is quite dire, given the fact that, even under strict
socialist surveillance, one could at least enjoy a certain amount of freedom
in the kitchen because the old socialist media were mainly ­c oncerned with
‘serious’ political issues instead of attending to trivial tips for household
management.
While I agree with Earl’s argument about the failure of Vietnamese
magazines to liberate women from the burden of domestic life, I am not
convinced by her subsequent conclusion that such a failure merely perpetuates state-controlled ideology. The images of women as tied to domestic
roles, and the promotion of idealized family values, are by no way peculiar
to Vietnam. In other parts of the world, including many ‘developed’ Western
societies without a recent history of political dictatorship, lifestyle magazines commonly equate women with their ‘traditional’ positions of mother,
wife, and homemaker in the same way that Vietnamese women’s magazines
­ iscourse
do. There are plenty of studies that use the methods of content and d
analysis to reveal the persistence of gender stereotypes ­represented by magazines in non-socialist societies (see, for example, Johnston & ­Swanson
2003; Fruhauf et al. 2008; Gill 2009; Nam et al. 2011). For instance, in their
­reading of the five most subscribed-to women’s magazines in the United
States, Johnston and Swanson (2003, p. 29) write, ‘It is clear that women’s
magazines persist in the promotion of traditional c­ onstructions of motherhood. The results of our study indicate that mothers are presented in maga­
zines as white, at-home mothers, who seldom venture outside the domestic
sphere’. Even in the case of magazines such as Cosmopolitan or Glamour,
where images of ‘non-traditional’ women are promoted, Thornborrow and
Machin (2006) argue that female agency is reduced mainly to sexual activeness and the ‘freedom’ to display one’s own body. Such an ‘alternative’
discourse is far from liberating for women; instead, it replaces traditional
stereotypes with new norms of sexual transgression. Interestingly, Thornborrow and Machin (2006, p. 186) briefly analyze a Vietnamese women’s
magazine in 2002, and argue that it actually strives to adopt ‘the same
From socialist moralism to market ethics
65
discourses of sex as empowerment’ seen in global magazines as an alternative to the traditional ideal of Asian womanhood. The fact that lifestyle
magazines in various contexts consistently reduce women to their domestic
role or sexual identity indicates that gender inequality does not intrinsically
link to a socialist world view. It is a problem of ‘socialist’ and ‘­capitalist’
­societies alike but seems to have been intensified by the escalation of ­capitalist
globalization.
Writing more generally about lifestyle media other than women’s magazines, Ouellette and Hay (2008a) also notice that commercial makeover
television shows in the United States often reuse traditional stereotypes to
foster new assemblages of cultural governance. For instance, the slogan of
the Shaq’s Big Challenge, a reality programme that helps obese children to
reduce weight and adopt a healthy lifestyle, is strikingly similar to the traditional ideals of American family life and the American nation. The ­slogan
reads, ‘We approach the health of a nation, one child, one community,
one state at a time, until we truly are a happier, healthier, fitter ­A merica’
­(Ouellette & Hay 2008b, p. 471). But Shaq’s Big Challenge only recycles
old values to promote a new form of neoliberal governance that reaches
­beyond the role of bureaucratic institutions. Instead of imposing ideological
lessons upon viewers to turn them into obedient citizens, the show grants
viewers the freedom to form their own lifestyle through expert coaching and
self-discipline. Ouellette and Hay’s study indicates that it would be rather
hasty to jump to the conclusion that any convergence between the themes of
lifestyle media and state agendas would reflect an autonomous and causal
political collusion. In other words, a similarity in the ‘what’ does not necessarily imply a shared style in the ‘how’ of power practice.
If the Vietnamese state had indeed found a way to translate its previous dogmatic rules into the practical guidelines that appear in ­advertisement-based
magazines, then this translation process deserves more careful examination. The translation could not happen automatically out of the mere intention of ‘the state’ but must be involved with a specific ensemble of new media
technologies (in this case, the advent of women’s magazines), economic rationality (the commercialization of cultural products), and local and global
discourses on gender and sexuality. Again, it is more productive to study
the relationship between the state and lifestyle media by posing the question
of how state power and the media become integrated into a certain way of
governing realities than merely to focus on the question of ‘what’ the state
wants the media to do. As Rose and Miller (2010, p. 275) put it,
The question is no longer one of accounting for government in terms of
‘the power of the state’, but of ascertaining how, and to what extent, the
state is articulated into the activity of government: what relations are
established between political and other authorities; what funds, forces,
persons, knowledge or legitimacy are utilized; and by means of what
devices and techniques are these different tactics made operable.
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From socialist moralism to market ethics
So, while there is nothing invalid in the way Earl aligns basic themes promoted by Vietnamese lifestyle media with ideological values imposed by the
state, her method neglects the fundamental difference between the ‘how’ of
these practices. The spectre of socialist authoritarianism hinders the understanding of how new technologies of power introduced after the Reform
increasingly enabled new relational networks of state and non-state forces,
the results of which were not determined by any single actor’s intention.
I argue alternatively that the popular media in Vietnam actually destabilize
state power by redistributing power relations in ways that no longer take state
institutions as their only base. Although the state still maintains its practices of
political censorship and ideological brainwashing, its sovereign power cannot
cover the grass-roots level of daily living, which has become much denser since
the Reform. Various realms of ordinary life, typically family living, education,
and entertainment, once heavily subject to the sovereign surveillance of the
socialist state, are now becoming sites of new possibilities for micropolitical
intervention thanks to ordinary media. Ordinary media practices still promote
the general productivity of the population, a strategic goal also targeted by the
Vietnamese state (and state institutions in any other parts of the world as well),
but these practices increasingly achieve such goals through new assemblages of
power relations that do not take state institutions as their dominant facilitators.
Participation, subjectivity, government
So how do ordinary media function as part of new power networks? The
inclusion of ordinary people and the burgeoning of daily life concerns in
the media, particularly in television, have received special attention in the
field of cultural studies (see, for example, Livingstone & Lunt 1994; ­Hartley
1999; Dovey 2000; Bonner 2003; Andrejevic 2004; Bell & Hollows 2005;
Ouellette & Hay 2008a; Palmer 2008; Weber 2009; Turner 2010; Kraidy &
Sender 2011; Skeggs & Wood 2012; Martin et al. 2013). This wide range of
academic work has imposed different levels of expectation upon ordinary
media. Some are optimistic, while others are more pessimistic, but all see
ordinary television as an important technology of social and cultural government that significantly differs from previous televisual practices.
Hartley (1999) provides a rather rosy picture of the work of ordinary television. Hartley (1999, p. 154) coins the term ‘democratainment’ to assert
that we are witnessing an ongoing and diversifying process of mediated
democratization. The participatory shift taken by popular television promotes what Hartley (1999, p. 155) terms ‘do-it-yourself citizenship’, in which
viewers have more possibilities to construct their cultural identities for
themselves. There is more access for ordinary people, especially those from
marginalized groups, to participate in public forums. Voices from below are
consequently more likely to be heard. Ordinary television thus p
­ romotes
cross-difference dialogues, increases social and cultural tolerance, and
­allows identity-formation to be more flexible and less discriminatory.
From socialist moralism to market ethics
67
This encouraging position is challenged by Turner (2010, p. 16), who argues that in the coupling of ‘democratainment’ democracy is actually an
‘occasional and accidental consequence’ of entertainment rather than the
other way around. In his survey of how ordinary people participate in the
production of television, radio, print, and Internet content, Turner is more
cautious than Hartley by describing the proliferation of ordinary media as
a ‘demotic turn’ instead of as ‘democratic’. As Turner (2010, p. 42) argues,
‘demotic’ television programmes play a unique role in the construction and
translation of cultural identity by demonstrating ‘an exceptional capacity to
embed themselves in the processes through which their audiences construct
their everyday lives’. But there cannot be a single conclusion about the relationship between ordinary media and democracy. While cultural benefit can
be found in some instances, there is also an impoverishment of the democratic function in others. Overall, the empowering possibilities offered by the
demotic turn mostly support commercial imperatives, rather than ­reflecting
a truly democratic process of bottom-up inclusion. In the ­equation between
money and democracy, the survival and profit of media organizations are
valued far more than the common good of ordinary citizens.
There are more severe critiques of the interactive and inclusive relationship between television and its viewers. Skeggs (2005) agrees with Hartley
that television increasingly promotes self-performing conduct, and offers
viewers more chances to compose their customized forms of selfhood. As
Skeggs (2005, p. 974) puts it, among the ‘repertoires of trauma, stress, attitude, intelligence, self-esteem, fulfilment and self-realisation’ offered by
ordinary television, ‘it is up to the individual to “choose” their repertoire’.
However, such a new manner of self-making is ‘compulsory individuality’ rather than empowering freedom (Skeggs 2005, p. 968). For Skeggs,
self-making through popular media is a new form of symbolic violence in
the name of subjective freedom. While viewers are indeed engaging in do-ityourself citizenship, they actually have ‘no choice but to choose’, and thus
only navigate within a restrained plurality of identity-formations (Skeggs
2005, p. 974). Skeggs thus stresses that, in most cases, what ordinary television allows is a new making of class distinction and gender discrimination
through lifestyle choices.
In what is possibly the most intense critical account of popular television, Andrejevic (2004) asserts that reality shows include ordinary people
as a new mode of labour enabled by the coupling of interactivity and surveillance. This new labour mode is exploitative to both participants and
viewers. The discourse of empowerment much embraced by producers
and contestants thus works to disguise a new form of capitalist escalation,
in which those involved become much more willing to be exploited than
in older modes of labour. Andrejevic goes on to argue that participants’
compliance in ‘the work of being watched’ on television indicates a sophisticated increase in social surveillance. In the same vein as Andrejevic,
Lemma (2013, p. 55) analyzes how reality shows, particularly the makeover
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From socialist moralism to market ethics
programmes, promote self-knowledge and self-management to ‘promulgate
a corrupt notion of ­empowerment’ by providing a soothing effect upon individual anxiety. Lemma (2013, p. 55) terms the empowering effect offered
by makeover reality shows a ‘total surveillance psychic economy’, which
happens at the intersection of internal and external realities. So, the more
interactive and participatory television becomes, the more viewers and participants are subject to an increasingly pervasive web of subjugating power.
The earlier studies, while varying in their critical approach to ordinary
television, all focus on the way ordinary television demonstrates a fundamental shift in subject formation, that is, the ways in which participants
and viewers construct their own selfhood, for better or worse, through their
engagement in the ordinary experience enabled by the small screen. Such a
dynamic of self-making is an important answer to the question of how ordinary television participates in governing social life. This is where Foucault’s
notion of ethics as the practice of self-formation becomes an enabling tool
in connecting various positions taken by the aforementioned authors that
are set within the spectrum between two extreme points of an emancipating
television and a subjugating one. Foucault’s concept of ethics is particularly helpful in problematizing the work of ordinary television in Vietnam
because this concept helps differentiate ordinary television from previous
media practices that were aimed mainly at the suppression of self-formation
instead of its production.
Ethics, according to Foucault (2003a, 2003d), is how we relate to ourselves
in our own terms. Instead of being a transcendental set of moral values or
expectations that exists prior to the formation of the subject, ethics is a complex and changing process where an individual appropriates the material
and discursive substance available to them to transform into a subject. As
such, the practice of ethics is only possible when the subject can maintain
a certain freedom, however limited it might be, in creating their own sense
of selfhood. Ethics is thus highly practical and situational, dependent on
the historical conjuncture of different techniques, forms of knowledge, and
material settings.
It is crucial to differentiate ethics from morality. In Foucault’s terms, morality refers to codes of conduct imposed from outside, whereas ethics is
how one chooses to ‘conduct oneself’ (2012, p. 26). Morality focusses on
obedience, which is in contrast to the way ethics operates within the space of
subjective freedom. The strict norm of sexual loyalty in wedded couples, for
example, is a stable moral code found in many societies, but in practice there
is no single way of being ‘faithful’. How one manages to find one’s own way
to practice ‘faithfulness’ within and beyond the moral code imposed from
outside is the work of ethics. Being external to subjectivity, the language of
morality more often prevails under a coercive state of domination, such as
under sovereign and disciplinary rules, while the language of ethics is more
prominent in governmental practices, where the technology of domination
works through the technology of the self.
From socialist moralism to market ethics
69
Drawing on Foucault, Hawkins (2001) argues that the burgeoning of daily
concerns in many ordinary programmes demonstrates a decisive turn to
ethics, and the decline of news and current affairs reflects the weariness
of moralism. Television morality, once a major focus of news and current
­affairs, is explicitly normative and concerned mainly with policing the border
between right and wrong. With the language of ethics, typically in ordinary
genres, television no longer imposes judgement in the name of some universal virtues, but modestly guides viewers through the minor and practical
problems of their daily life. The scope of ethical concerns explored by ordinary television is endless because, while the boundary between right and
wrong is more or less rigid in a moral code, such a boundary is full of uncertainty and diversity once applied in lived experience. In presenting numerous trivial (but puzzling) examples of daily concerns and conflicts, such as
how to clean one’s fridge, how to measure couple compatibility, how to cope
with an irritating roommate, or how to remain faithful to one’s partner,
­television ethics requires viewers to respond to the content by reflecting upon
their own circumstances and fulfilling their own aspirations. Television ethics thus suggests what we ought to be and what we choose to be, rather than
what we are told to be.
When we say that ethics is a practical matter of self-formation, we should
note that Foucault preserves no inherent essence or inwardness for the concept of ‘the self’. Although individuals only become ethical subjects in their
own freedom, this does not mean that they possess some kind of autonomous agency that can turn them into whatever they may choose to be. When
individuals turn themselves into subjects through their encountering and
responding to the world, they simultaneously get involved in and are subject
to a network of power relations whose effects are not determined by their
own will. Self-formation is thus active, but not simply intentional. In this
sense, as Hawkins stresses, subjectivity and subjection are inseparable, and
freedom is not opposite to but a key element in power practice.
Beyond socialist moralism
Foucault’s distinction between morality and ethics allows an alternative
reading of Vietnamese lifestyle media to that offered by Earl. As Earl is
concerned mainly with comparing the codes of gender in lifestyle media and
those promoted by the state, she neglects the manner in which lifestyle media translate the moralist codes into ethical options that deliberately reserve
a free space of customization for the audience. The ethics of self-formation
might change vastly even when the moral codes stay more or less unchanged.
A similarity to the state’s agenda in moral themes does not prevent ordinary
Vietnamese media from generating new and more complex mechanisms that
promote self-fashioning instead of state oppression. The space of ethics is
precisely how lifestyle media are different from previous socialist practices
of propaganda based mainly on moralist dogma.
70 From socialist moralism to market ethics
Here I will provide two examples to demonstrate my point about the replacing of moralism by ethics in Vietnamese television. The first example is
the game show Stay at Home on Sunday (‘Ở Nhà Chủ Nhật’), broadcast on
VTV3. The second is the ongoing nationwide campaign run by the state to
promote the so-called ‘cultured family’ (gia đình văn hoá).
Stay at Home on Sunday began in 1998 and lasted for nine years until
2007. It was among the earliest domestic game shows in Vietnam, together
with SV’96, Seven Shades of Rainbow (‘Bảy Sắc Cầu Vồng’) and Road to
Mount Olympus (‘Đường Lên Đỉnh Olympia’). Broadcast every Sunday at
lunchtime, the main purpose of Stay at Home on Sunday was to reach viewers at their weekend family gathering to encourage affective bonding among
family members and to provide useful knowledge and tips on housekeeping.
Each show featured a competition among three families who answered quizzes and joined in with interactive games. Each family always contained a
husband and a wife, and in most cases one or two children. Joining the show
on a voluntary basis, the families often displayed their ‘happiness’ through
a mixture of eagerness and nervousness: Singing a self-composed song
with all the members’ names included; retelling the first date of ‘Mum and
Dad’; ­explaining a funny nickname; or, in many cases, anxiously ­repeating
a ­family biography that had obviously been learned by heart beforehand.
Such ­amateur performances, half-clumsy, half-creative, had their own
­appeal: They showed viewers an image of themselves, implying that they
too could be a part of this television event.
Stay at Home on Sunday problematized the daily life of a family as a
series of minor and technical problems, such as a stubborn stain, a messy
refrigerator, a smelly pair of shoes, fatty food, fussy infants, unwanted insects, chewy beef, and blunt knives. Over the course of its nine-year run,
this programme provided thousands of convenient solutions for the endless
tiny troubles of daily living. Clearly, the household queries in Stay at Home
on Sunday were not purely clinical: They were more a matter of maintaining ethical living at the level of everyday activities. The problematization
of everyday life in Stay at Home on Sunday is implicitly based on various ethical assumptions about how one should conduct one’s family life. A
clean refrigerator is linked with hygienic organization of domestic space. A
home-prepared meal of less fat and more vegetables is evidence of a healthy
lifestyle and a caring attitude. A spotless outfit reflects self-esteem. Beef
that is cooked nicely brings joy and style to a family dinner. A sharp knife
saves time and energy while enhancing the simple pleasure of chopping
food. Less time spent on housekeeping means more quality time for family, children, and you. You need to know how to maintain and promote a
healthy standard for your kitchen, your family, and yourself. All of these
minor practices ethically reflect how to transform your house into a home,
cultivate the next generation, and actualize your own dream of happiness.
The hidden message of Stay at Home on Sunday is that a better lifestyle
means worthier living.
From socialist moralism to market ethics
71
Stay at Home on Sunday’s content is similar to the lifestyle discourse
appearing in the women’s magazines analyzed by Earl (2013), where many
pieces of advice can be found on organizing one’s kitchen or on maintaining
a romantic relationship. The household tips combined with the display of
ordinary ‘happiness’ in Stay at Home on Sunday also perpetuated various
ideals of heterosexual monogamy, healthy children, and gender roles that,
as Earl (2013) points out, were also promoted by the Vietnamese state. But
the techniques of power exercised by the state in governing the household
were very different from the ethical dimensions of ordinary media.
A closer look at an example on the side of the state will provide us with
a clearer comparison. After the Reform, the state revitalized the so-called
‘Mobilisation campaign to build a cultured life in the neighbourhood’
(Cuộc vận động xây dựng đời sống văn hóa ở khu dân cư), which was originally initiated in the 1960s to impose a socialist culture in the North of
­Vietnam (Leshkowich 2014). The purpose of the post-Reform campaign
was to advance the cultural and economic standards of Vietnamese households in accordance with the national goals of post-Reform development.
The major component of this campaign, and its most tangible outcome, was
to select and grant the titles of ‘cultured family’ (gia đình văn hoá), ‘cultured
village’ (làng văn hoá), and ‘cultured neighbourhood’ (tổ dân phố văn hoá)
to families and local communities across the nation. In 2013, 76 per cent
of all Vietnamese households were granted the title ‘cultured family’ and
in many areas this proportion of the population reached more than 90 per
cent (Hồng 2013).
The official guidelines for the selection of a ‘cultured family’ have been revitalized several times, with minor variations in the criteria and procedures
involved (Bộ Văn Hoá Thông Tin 2002; Bộ Văn Hoá Thông Tin 2006; Bộ
Văn Hoá Thể Thao Và Du Lịch 2011). The most recent guideline by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism provides a list of three major criteria,
each containing several bullet points of sub-qualifications, to define a ‘cultured family’ (Bộ Văn Hoá Thể Thao Và Du Lịch 2011). The first criterion
is an ideological requirement that checks whether a family is ‘abiding by the
guidelines and policies of the Party, the law of the State, and actively participating in local emulation campaigns’. The second criterion focusses on
the maintenance of a ‘harmonious, happy, and progressive’ family, and the
last criterion covers the household economy. The sub-qualifications under
each of the three main criteria cover detailed aspects, such as community
participation, social responsibility, family planning, health, lifestyle, gender
equality, education, poverty reduction, and so on. On the matter of health
and lifestyle, the circular states briefly that a ‘cultured family’ should
[B]e hygienic to prevent disease, neatly organize the house, maintain
green-clean-beautiful (xanh-sạch-đẹp) surroundings, use clean water
and hygienic toilette; family members should maintain a healthy lifestyle and practice physical exercise regularly.
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From socialist moralism to market ethics
This bullet point is arguably the most specific and applicable in the long
list of sub-criteria. Other requirements are much more ambiguous, such as
‘having a cultured public manner’ (nếp sống văn hóa nơi công cộng), ‘preserving cultural values of the traditional family’ (giữ gìn các giá trị văn hóa gia
đình truyền thống), ‘raising healthy children, teaching respectful children’
(nuôi con khỏe, dạy con ngoan), and ‘practicing thrift’ (thực hành tiết kiệm).
These criteria are either too vague or too generic to be practicable in actual
family activities. In aiding such an abstract list of requirements, the circular goes on at length to describe the bureaucratic process in identifying
the ‘cultured’ family very clear. Each family needs to ‘register’ to join the
campaign by signing a commitment document circulated by the local authority. ­Annually, a meeting based on neighbourhood discussion and open
voting will be chaired by local leaders to decide which families are ‘cultured’ enough to gain the title. Once the local People’s Committees finish
the granting of awards to cultured families, a similar process is repeated to
judge the so-called ‘cultured village’ (in the countryside) or ‘cultured neighbourhood’ (in urban areas). Again, this selection process is based on a long
list of ­requirements, which mostly demand that a certain percentage of families within the territory obtain various political, cultural, and economic
qualifications. In order to be a ‘cultured’ community, for instance, a village
should have at least 70 per cent households granted the title of ‘cultured
family’ and no less than half of them having maintained the title for more
than three continuous years. The reward for this selection process is a certificate presented to each ‘cultured’ family and village.
Several authors have analyzed the ‘cultured family’ campaign in terms of
how the state uses its vertical system of wards and neighbourhoods to maintain and intensify political and moral control over grass-roots social units
(MacLean 2013, pp. 182–8; Leshkowich 2014). While these authors reveal
various aspects of the formulation and implementation of the campaign,
none analyze its actual effect upon the private life of Vietnamese families
and individuals. The extension and deepening of state power into local communities through the vertical political network do not necessarily guarantee a productive intervention in the intimate realm of household living. In
an interview published by Đất Việt online newspaper in 2013, Nguyễn Văn
Huy, one of the leading Vietnamese anthropologists and a socially respected
scholar, explicitly disapproves of the productivity of the whole procedure.
As he states, the certificate of ‘cultured family’ only represents a ‘dead title’
without any real impact upon Vietnamese family life. ‘I couldn’t accept the
manner of the campaign: Mass printing the guideline forms, distributing
them to the families to sign, and then granting the certificates’ (Thanh 2013,
para. 14). He emphasizes that the extremely high rate of 90 per cent of families’ being ‘cultured’ in many neighbourhoods of Hanoi does not reflect any
real improvement in the city’s household standards and instead only demonstrates the ‘disease of bogus achievement’ (bệnh thành thích) that is deeply
rooted in the state’s bureaucratic system (Thanh 2013, para. 17).
From socialist moralism to market ethics
73
Interestingly, this short piece of interview received 39 responses from online readers, a surprising number for an article on a not-so-popular topic.
All readers’ comments, some containing just a few words, others reaching
up to several paragraphs, enthusiastically agree with the unsparing viewpoint of the anthropologist Nguyễn Văn Huy. The majority of the comments
consider the campaign a waste of time and money, if not a practical joke,
and see it as undeniable evidence of fake achievement and moralist formalism. One reader writes, ‘Does anybody know who is going to benefit from
this campaign? I wonder if the rabble (dân đen) that signs the commitment
forms would benefit at all!’ While these comments cannot serve as a representative of the Vietnamese people’s perception of the campaign, it provides
a hint about the limited reach of state control into the private sphere of
family and individual living. The campaign provoked disdain and resistance (though mainly implicitly) instead of active engagement. The moral
codes imposed by this campaign lacked the capacity to inspire people to
internalize the outer norms into the ethical making of their own selves,
particularly when post-Reform subjects could find much better sources of
self-­empowerment through popular media. The role of the local People
Committees in this campaign, which was aided by bureaucratic and juridical measures, was external and superior to the governed households. The
Committees mainly exercised rigid moralism in the name of the collective
good. ­Despite its extensive reach to the whole population through political
networks, and despite the party state’s ambition to turn the campaign into
a grass-roots mechanism to control Vietnamese private lives, the Campaign
mainly worked as a technology of domination without being able to translate such domination into an ethical language of the self.
The moralist manner of the ‘cultured family’ project stands in stark contrast to the ethical language of ordinary television. Stay at Home on Sunday
transformed the problem of the ‘cultured family’ into a series of practical
solutions without even having to deploy the term ‘cultured’ at all. While
this show implicitly saw viewers’ lives as incomplete and thus in need of
­i mprovement, it also assumed that viewers were themselves capable of transforming their own situations. In my interview with Bùi Thu Thủy, the key
host and producer of Stay at Home on Sunday, I found no explicit connection between the state’s agenda and the motivation that drove the success of
Stay at Home on Sunday. The making of this show, as Thủy (personal communication, 25 October 2015) emphasized several times, received ‘not at all
any kind of ­political pressure, whatsoever. There was no ‘Mr State’ (ông nhà
nước nào) who intervened in this process. Not any sort of command or order
from official authorities’. As Thủy recalls, this show was made first and foremost to fill the increased broadcast hours in VTV3 and more importantly, to
increase advertising sales. In 1998, a Sunday programme for a whole family
was a good idea because there had been no entertainment show focussing
on this audience segment. The programme was even more feasible when
­Neptune, a major vegetable oil brand, agreed to be a long-term sponsor.
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From socialist moralism to market ethics
Stay at Home on Sunday soon proved itself to be a great generator of advertising revenue because not only Neptune but many other fast-moving consumer goods, such as detergents, beauty products, foods, and beverages,
also placed their advertisements on this family-oriented show. As a result,
Stay at Home on Sunday was financially self-sufficient without relying at all
on state funding until being taken off air in 2007.
Thủy (personal communication, 25 October 2015) explained why she focussed on household tips and why political censorship was not her concern:
I wanted to make viewers’ family life simpler and more enjoyable. We didn’t
want to do propaganda at all; nobody forced us to do so, and we deliberately tried to avoid appearing as such. We just wanted to provide something
useful to viewers, and that’s why we offered plenty of household tips.
During our conversation, Thủy confirmed that she was well aware of the
censorship system in Vietnamese, but she did not consider it a significant
constraint to the making of her entertainment programme. As long as Stay
at Home on Sunday could sell enough advertising, the show would go on
without having to be a direct mouthpiece of the party state. Thủy confirmed
that she and her team actively eschewed politicizing the programme, not
only because political content could lead to unexpected censorship issues
but more importantly because ideologically loaded themes were i­ rrelevant
to making a good lifestyle show. Thủy (personal communication, 25
­October 2015) said,
We all knew that political content would be carefully checked, for better or worse, so we only focused on household tips. The irony was that
even if we saw some goodness in the political system, we still avoided
promoting it when possible because doing so was still risky. No one
really knew how such content would be censored. The censorship was
sometimes very arbitrary! We thought that some content was politically
flattering but ‘they’ (người ta) might not think the same. To be safe, we
just did lifestyle and nothing more. And you know, we didn’t even need
political content to make a good game show anyway.
Herself an ardent believer in self-help discourse, Thủy was more concerned
with the practicality of her show than with its moralist or propagandist
value. Born in 1970, Thủy recalled her personal experience growing up under socialist education without any practical books or media products that
could guide her and her peers on useful living skills, such as how to use time
effectively, how to manage one’s family, and how to handle private issues
like sexual health and gender anxiety. Her personal experience motivated
her to produce a programme that offered practical solutions to daily family concerns. Thủy (personal communication, 25 October 2015) concluded
about the ultimate purpose of the show,
From socialist moralism to market ethics
75
Above all, when I know a good tip, I really want to share it with my
viewers so that they can make a better life. When we offer our viewers
certain knowledge or advice, our viewers might not like it, or might not
apply it immediately. But a tip can always become useful one day in a
suitable circumstance.
In our conversation, Thủy appeared less a propagandist of the state than
an active agent of governmentality who provided ethical options for her
viewers. The self-help discourse in Stay at Home on Sunday enabled a relationship with viewers that was based on trusted authority, but was not
authoritarian. The goal of Stay at Home on Sunday was not to give viewers
some bureaucratic acknowledgement or certification from an outsider as
seen in the ‘cultured family’ campaign, but to invite viewers to work upon
their own lives at their own convenience. The show achieved its effects, to
borrow Rose’s words (1999a, p. 10) on governmental power more generally,
‘not through the threat of violence or constraint, but by way of persuasion
inherent in its truths, the anxieties stimulated by its norms, and the attraction exercised by the images of life and self it offers to us’. When viewers
reuse the knowledge or skill provided by Stay at Home on Sunday to shape
their own conduct and to organize their family life, they are exercising power
for themselves and other family members. These viewers thus actively enter
a network of power relations where they are able to construct their world
and transform their lives according to what they aspire to and what is available to them. Even when viewers critically refuse to submit themselves to
the show’s guidance, they are still forming their own selves through the act
of choosing-not-to. A new condition of possibility for self-formation, or the
enfoldment of outer forces into the interiority of the self, is precisely what
Earl overlooks in her comparison between the practices of ordinary media
and those of the state-controlled propaganda.
At this point, I am not arguing that there is no state involvement in the
power techniques performed by Stay at Home on Sunday. Rather, I argue
that there is no such thing as a unified and autonomous ‘state’ that remains
unchanged from one power practice to another. Despite the fact that in her
professional pride, Thủy resolutely refused the suggestion of any direct manipulation from state institutions regarding her making of Stay at Home on
Sunday, she and her team were surely subject to various forces under the
control of multiple state agencies and political procedures. By law, VTV3
(and all Vietnamese media) belonged to the state. The fact that Thủy and
her team deliberately evade politicizing their show already indicated their
acceptance of the political boundary set by the state. The commercial imperative that motivated the production of Stay at Home on Sunday was obviously allowed, if not encouraged, by the state, and is needed to abide by
the legal system imposed from above. More importantly, no one, including
Thủy herself, can delineate the sources from which Thủy and her team cultivated their desire to distribute practical tips to viewers: Whether through
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From socialist moralism to market ethics
their educational background that was in many ways controlled by state
agendas, through their personal family history, or through their resistance
to the state’s lack of attention to the ‘how’ of daily living. When Thủy said
that she enjoyed her own professional freedom in creating Stay at Home on
Sunday, the external forces exerted by both state and non-state factors had
been internalized into the making of her professional self. In this case, the
question of state power is only enabling when we stop taking the concept of
‘the state’ for granted, instead seeing the state as a dynamic effect of different assemblages of humans, technologies, and events. ‘The state’ as involved
in Stay at Home on Sunday is far different from ‘the state’ in the ‘cultured
family’ campaign. These two practices of state power cannot be equated or
compared without breaking up ‘the state’ into specific networks of power
relations.
In order to explore the new possibilities and constraints enabled by
post-Reform television without falling back into the pitfall of a state-centric
approach, I propose to leave behind the static concept of the state to more
specifically discuss how particular state and the non-state forces are intertwined into a web of power to produce an overall effect on the government
of post-Reform living. My argument is that the role of the party state has become increasingly destabilized since the Reform. Particularly in the case of
popular media, the model of state-centred power has largely been replaced
by a model of governmental power that operates more through self-conduct
following market impulses.
But just as one cannot take for granted the concept of the ‘state’, one
cannot turn governmentality into an autonomous and all-powerful form
of power either. In proposing to go beyond the question of state power,
I do not attempt to replace the concept of the ‘state’ with an even more
­omnipresent concept of ‘governmentality’ as a more ‘advanced’ modality
of power that can control human beings deeply in terms of the formation of
their own selves. As Grossberg et al. (2003, p. 32) warns us, there is a danger
that a careless use of the term ‘governmentality’ will turn this concept into
a ­modality of power ‘so broad and general’ that it will be at the expense of
all the specificity always emphasized by Foucault. The theoretical focus on
subjectivities and governmental freedom might easily lend itself either to the
dire prospect of selves as mere effects of governmentality or, on the other
side of the spectrum, a kind of intentionalist agency that invents itself purely
in its own will. In avoiding granting too much autonomy and intentionality
to the work of governmentality, Grossberg et al. (2003, p. 33) reminds us to
analyze individual agency as part of a grounded network of power relations,
which is open to change, success, opposition, and failure. In their analysis
of the famous reality show The Apprentice, Couldry and Littler (2011, p. 266)
also stress that governmentality only serves as an enabling theoretical tool
when we ‘take agency seriously without romanticising it’, so that we can
see both the potentiality and the constraints of the governmental formation
of subjectivities. It is thus not only the control but also the limits of each
From socialist moralism to market ethics
77
governmental practice that allow us to understand the relationship between
power and subjectivities. The task of investigating specific instances of
­cultural government performed by ordinary television shows is done in my
next two chapters, which explore the ethical formation of nationalist subjectivities in two home-grown programmes: The talk show ­Contemporaries and
the reality show As if We Never Parted.
4
Personal wealth, national pride
On 25 July 2012, Forbes magazine ran a long feature about Vietnam’s socalled ‘Coffee King’, Đặng Lê Nguyên Vũ, naming him ‘an unofficial ambassador of Vietnam’s economic evolution’ (Harris 2012, p. 2). Vũ earned
this title because his franchise coffee brand, Trung Nguyên, had brought
him a personal worth of $100 million, which was ‘a mind-boggling sum
in a country whose per capita income is $1300’ (Harris 2012, p. 1). Forbes,
however, was ten years late in discovering Vũ as a national icon. He was
first celebrated by VTV1, the major national television channel. In 2002,
Contemporaries, a popular talk show on VTV1, showcased Vũ as a nationalist businessman of the post-Reform era. The story of Vũ was one among
a large number of similar cases of businesspeople celebrated by this talk
show, demonstrating how capitalism was warmly welcome in a country with
a recent history of authoritarian socialism.
So how is Vietnam, a nation once framed by proletarian revolution,
reframed on television as a nation of economic evolution? How can capitalist accumulation and individualist achievement, once publicly condemned, be represented as an inherent part of post-Reform national
pride? What is the role of television in constituting such change? How
do new forms of national government emerge within existing networks
of ­restrictions? And how does this transformation fit into the larger
­landscape of globalization?
In what follows, I use the case of the talk show Contemporaries to explore
the ways popular television relies on market logics to alter the process of
national imagination in Vietnam post-Reform. Contemporaries consistently
promoted personal affluence as constitutive of the national pride, and in
so doing, advocated individual entrepreneurship instead of political loyalty
as a desirable practice of nationalism. While Contemporaries abandoned
the language of socialist collectivism to embrace the new ethics of individualized responsibility following the market logics, this show reaffirmed
­instead of questioning nationalist bonds previously constructed by socialist
­politics. This talk show consequently evaded the post-Reform problem of
economic disparities by reducing systemic inequality into a matter of personal accomplishment.
Personal wealth, national pride
79
Contemporaries is a promising case study because this talk show exhibits an
extensive variety of stories about personal achievement and national responsibility in post-Reform Vietnam. Contemporaries ran from 2001 to 2012 under the
slogan ‘the key to success’, in which viewers were invited to engage in in-depth
dialogues about highly relevant problems of the post-Reform times, such as
start-up business, technological innovation, social philanthropy, or educational
reform. During 11 years of existence, Contemporaries hosted more than 400
interviewees, serving as one of the longest programmes with the largest number of guests in the relatively short history of Vietnamese television. The talk
show was produced by the VTV3 game show team, but was broadcast weekly
on VTV1, the channel for news and current affairs. This switch of channel was
because Contemporaries had a ‘commentary element’ (yếu tố chính luận) considered more ‘serious’ than the purely entertainment products commonly shown
by VTV3 (personal communication with Tạ Bích Loan, 26 February 2014).
Contemporaries became exceptionally well known in Vietnam, partly
­because of its guests, most of whom were rich, talented, and/or famous, and
partly because of its host and founder, Tạ Bích Loan, one of the television
icons in Vietnam after the Reform. In 1996, upon her return from Russia
with a doctoral degree in journalism, Loan joined the SV’96 team and was
immediately known as a highly creative member of VTV3. She was the
­developer and host of several defining shows of VTV3 in its early years, most
typically Seven Shades of Rainbow and Road to Mount Olympus, two famous
edutainment programmes for high school students. In 2001, the launch and
immediate success of Contemporaries added more positive reputation to
Loan’s image as a prominent developer of Vietnamese television.
In its heyday, the name ‘Người Đương Thời’ was so popular that it found
its way into songs, books, and daily conversation to signify a successful person who had achieved special fame or made a contribution to society. When
one of the guests, Nguyễn Đình Chiến, got arrested in 2009 for wrong management of business debt, all newspapers ran headlines specifically calling
him ‘a cheating Contemporary’. He hit big news not only because of his
business fraud but also because of his entitlement as a guest of the much-­
respected television programme on the national network.
In each talk show episode, Contemporaries presented a one-to-one dialogue
between Loan and a guest who was chosen if he or she had ‘something special’
(có điều gì đặc biệt) that could capture viewers’ interest. Loan (personal communication, 26 February 2014) explained what she meant by ‘something special’:
I realize an interesting thing about our guests: When a person does
something extraordinary, she or he usually has a special motivation,
something deep and rare. Success doesn’t come easily, so a person needs
to have a very special driving force that is strong enough to help them
overcome constant struggles. Most of the time my guests’ motivation is
personal. I realize that behind a success is always a touching, or painful,
or strange story that could surprise our viewers.
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Personal wealth, national pride
Loan and her team focussed on the ‘personal story’ behind success, not the
success per se. The idea was that each story of success was unique, which
deserved a whole talk to discover. All Contemporaries talks prioritized individual details, searching for ‘the key to success’ in personal experiences. An
intimate childhood memory, a life-changing incident, and an inspirational
moment of self-realization were often turned into empowering details that
received special elaboration and discussion. Each episode was assigned a
theme symbolically related to the guest’s biographical story. The producers always knew the ‘story’ in advance by interviewing the guests and their
friends, family, and colleagues before each talk. Based on this preliminary
research, the production team drafted a Q&A structure that fleshed out
­i mportant events in the guest’s biography, and in so doing gave the guests
key points to retell their own story in their own voice. The production team
also made short packages of footage featuring a broader picture of the
guest’s personal and professional life, which were scattered throughout the
talk as illustrations of the Q&A session. This procedure allowed Contemporaries to turn simple talks on television into personalized and inspiring
sessions of storytelling, encouraging guests to talk ‘naturally’ while still allowing the producers to control the narrative.
A nation of self-mastery
In nine years, Contemporaries hosted more than 400 guests from extremely diverse walks of life. Some guests, however, got more attention
than others. My loose categorization shows us that the two main groups
of ­Contemporaries guests were talented professionals (35 per cent) and
successful businesspeople (33 per cent). Experts and entrepreneurs, rather
than politicians, accounted for roughly two-thirds of the total number of
guests. Contemporaries mainly celebrated talent or profit as a means of attaining personal wealth, career success, and fame. This logic of market individualism was coupled with that of self-taken responsibilization, in which
personal achievements were characterized as ethical contributions to the
prosperity of the nation. In Contemporaries, the personal reigned, the market prevailed, and the politics retreated.
Other guests included philanthropic figures (13 per cent), former socialist heroes (6 per cent), foreigners (6 per cent), and anti-corruption activists
(2 per cent). The philanthropic group included people with disabilities, HIV,
and other illnesses, as well as benefactors, and in effect further ­depoliticized
the discourse of self-help in the show. In stories with a philanthropic theme,
narratives of compassion and resilience were presented as neither commercial nor political, but purely as ‘inspiration of good humanity’, as one
producer explained (personal communication with Tạ Minh Phương, 27
July 2014). Most disadvantaged guests in Contemporaries said that they felt
deeply empowered when they could do meaningful work for their homeland. With positive contributions to the nation, the guests saw themselves
Personal wealth, national pride
81
as disabled but not wasted. So while guests with a disability strived to overcome their own destiny, such ‘overcoming’ was seen as much more worthy
once connected with nationalist responsibility. The three main groups of
businesspeople, professionals, and philanthropists made up more than 80
per cent of the total number of guests, illustrating how Contemporaries constructed an idea of the nation as a community of self-mastering individuals,
not a territory of political uniformity.
Political discussion was very limited on Contemporaries. Anti-corruption
activists were sporadically invited (2 per cent), which hinted at a sense of
democratic activism, but not enough to transform the show into a political
demonstration. Stories of anti-corruption often swung between an explicit
celebration of individual courage against wrongdoing and an implicit attack
on the corruptive regime. Contemporaries did not stray completely from the
political values of the socialist past either. Occasionally the show invited
former socialist heroes (6 per cent) to share their historical stories, often
creating a strong touch of socialist nostalgia. But instead of being asked to
repeat the old mantra of heroic nationalism, socialist veterans were turned
into individual examples of how national heroes of the past strove to move
forward in their private lives, and kept contributing to their nation even
when they were no longer heroic fighters. Historical and political grand narratives of nationalist socialism were often reinterpreted as personal journeys
of survival in both war and peace, promoting the logic of market competition without disregarding that of socialist heroism.
In April 2005, for instance, Contemporaries joined the media euphoria in
­Vietnam to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the so-called ‘Southern Liberation’ by interviewing four socialist soldiers who sat on the legendary Tank
390 that broke the gate of the Presidential Palace in Saigon. The iconic image of Tank 390 entering the Palace on 30 April 1975 marked the official fall
of the Southern regime and the end of the Second Indochina War. Being
famous ­heroes of the Northern army, these soldiers well suited the party
state’s promotion of the socialist heroic legacy. But repeating socialist propaganda was not the only purpose of the show. After talking to the four veterans about their extraordinary memories of the victory day, the host invited
another guest, a secret one, onto the stage. This unexpected figure was the
left-behind soldier of Tank 390, who was badly injured just half a day before
the victory, and was replaced by another soldier at the last minute. Now an
unknown bricklayer, he was brought from his poor country home to Contemporaries to share his war memories in the past and his ordinary life in the
­ aigon, he met his old comrades,
present. For the first time since the fall of S
now presented as heroes of the ­nation. ­Bursting into tears, the left-behind
man stood humbly next to the friends with whom he should have shared the
same heroic fate.
As the show went on, the story of this unknown hero emerged as far more inspiring and curious than the repeated narrative of socialist heroism told by his
old friends. Bùi Thị Thu Hương (personal communication, 28 February 2014),
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Personal wealth, national pride
the producer who discovered and brought the left-behind soldier to Contemporaries, explained that the presence of this man was not to defame his friends
but to show viewers that extraordinariness might also be found in an almost
­invisible person. Before the show, Hương had already spent time talking to this
man, and knew that he saw himself as someone who was destined to miss all
good opportunities in his life due to pure bad luck. As this man told Hương,
he had missed an opportunity to become a national hero. He also missed the
chance to be a recognized wounded veteran because he was injured four times
during the war but was rated as having only 18 per cent disabled, just below
the 20 per cent threshold to receive lifetime social welfare. He also missed an
opportunity to father a girl, who died as an infant. These details were provoked
by the host in the actual show, and one of the most touching moments was when
the man made a simple conclusion: ‘My life is all about being “almost”’. But
soon it became clear to viewers that the missed opportunities did not stop this
man from being a very optimistic person with admirable self-esteem. ­Although
his previous sacrifice for the nation was completely unknown and unrewarded,
he never blamed the past; instead he inspired viewers by his sincere humility
and a great sense of humour. He generated much laughter from the audiences
when he wittily described his own poverty, and provoked tears when he told
viewers that his wife refused to come to the studio because she did not have
nice clothes to wear. The man served as a living example of how one person
could survive bad luck and injustice with integrity and hope.
At first glance, this particular show was meant to celebrate a heroic event
of the socialist past, but the producers managed to combine socialist collectivism with the ethics of self-growth. The poor man, though vastly different
from other business guests in terms of wealth, was strikingly similar to them
in the shared narrative of inner strength. Life was unfair to him, but the
old veteran had survived both the past and the present. With his participation, the message of this show was no longer about the heroic virtues of
glorious socialism, but rather the humble progression of an individual when
he moved forward in life. In this sense, the man was an admirable self, a
true ‘contemporary’. His stories also implicitly revealed the uncelebrated
side of the heroic nation in peacetime: The side of ongoing poverty and the
need for economic improvement as an ethical complement to those who had
suffered for the nation in the past. The man appeared in the show not only
to present a moral lesson about socialist prestige but also to invite viewers’
­reflection on pressing problems of the present. His participation thus provoked a strong sense of socialist nostalgia that was already blended with the
subtle guilt of post-Reform social injustice.
The combination of various types of desirable citizenship portrayed in
Contemporaries, though in very different proportions, created a synergy for
all the composing elements. The groups of disabled people, wartime heroes,
and anti-corruption activists did not lessen the dominant appeal of money
and expertise represented by the two major groups of entrepreneurs and
professionals. Rather, each group served as an alibi for the others, so that
Personal wealth, national pride
83
the show could safely locate itself within the ambivalence of neo­liberal
ethics and socialist politics. The blurred boundary between market and
democracy was useful because it allowed Contemporaries to give a strong
impression of egalitarian representation, even though the majority of stories
were market-related.
The focus on individualized expertise, wealth, and empowerment demonstrates how Contemporaries embraced the neoliberal language of the self.
This talk show joined an emerging market of self-help texts in Vietnam in the
early 2000s. Famous international titles such as Chicken Soup for the Soul,
Rich Dad Poor Dad, or How to Stop Worrying and Start Living were best
sellers for years, targeting a huge market of Vietnamese youngsters eager
to turn their life into a ‘journey’ of self-exploration and self-­advancement.
The thirst for personal fulfilment came in a pair with the rapid waning of
socialist collectivist norms and the inflating mistrust on the remaining of
socialist politics.
But Contemporaries does not simply promote personal success for the
sake of celebrating individualism. Instead, this talk show was thoroughly
imbued with the idea of a national community formed by self-­governing
members. The self was treated as an adhesive element that connected
­Vietnamese people in the post-Reform nation-building project. The linkage
between the personal and the national was seen as direct, natural, and indispensable. Loan (personal communication, 26 February 2014) explained,
‘I deeply believe that personal achievements only become meaningful when
they enrich national values. Conversely, national values can only be performed in personal lives’. For producers of Contemporaries, all persons were
worth celebrating as long as they strive to better themselves each day. Tạ
Minh Phương (personal communication, 27 July 2014), another member of
the production team, said,
When a single individual is improving, it is his or her own achievement.
When a single institution is improving, it is the institution’s own success. But if many individuals and many institutions improve at the same
time, then the nation will naturally improve.
Phương had no doubt that all kinds of individual achievements ended up
helping the nation. The assumption was that the chance of improvement was
equally distributed to all people and thus an ‘individual achievement’, small
or big, was in itself a contribution to the total performance of the nation.
Phương was not much concerned with the criteria for an achievement, or
the possibility that one’s success might hinder another’s. For her, it was obvious that the fate of the nation was first and foremost a matter of personal
determination.
Contemporaries demonstrated a very different understanding of the
­individual–nation relationship from that of socialist propaganda. Before
the Reform, socialist criteria for national heroes were purely political, and
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Personal wealth, national pride
individualism was the ultimate taboo. National heroes were mainly communist politicians, soldiers, and revolutionaries who promoted the ideological values of the Party at the expense of all personal markers (Zinoman
2001b; de Tréglodé 2012). As Zinoman (2001b, p. 22) argues in his reading
of communist prisoners’ memoirs, autobiographies of former national idols
usually contain ‘structurally identical episodes’ that mainly serve to glorify
the role of the party and to educate the younger generation about their political duty to the nation. By contrast, the choice of guests in Contemporaries,
while heavily informed by a nationalist framework, did not appear political
at all. The host of Contemporaries (personal communication, 26 February
2015) explained,
Very few politicians appeared in the show because Contemporaries
­focuses mainly on portraits of human beings, not political debates. But
even when politicians did come, they were treated first and foremost as
ordinary people. They are all equal to disabled guests, sportspersons,
businessmen, or any other figures. They got invited because they are
interesting people with interesting stories to share, not because of their
political position.
This statement saw political criteria as irrelevant, indeed, almost redundant, in the choice of an eligible guest. A guest was simply chosen on the
basis of personal originality, the ‘interesting’ quality, that they could share
with viewers. If politicians were not ‘interesting’ enough, or if they were
not willing to share their interesting stories, then there was no reason why
they should appear in the show. In Vietnam, inviting politicians to appear
on a popular television show was highly risky for both the show and the
politicians. The avoidance of politicians was thus an obvious act of self-­
censorship under the threat of state policing. In our conversation, however,
Loan did not appear to worry much about the lack of political discussion,
as she insisted that post-Reform life had numerous stories to be told, which
might be far more inspiring than political subject matter. Similar to the producers of Stay at Home on Sunday, who deliberately chose to focus purely on
household tips instead of ideological topics, the producers of Contemporaries also cleverly detoured around political censorship by rendering politics
unnecessary to the success of the show.
An evasion of political engagement was as convenient in coping with
harsh political censorship as it perfectly suited the extended atmosphere of
neoliberal capitalism. The way Contemporaries chose its guests on an ostensibly apolitical basis affirms Aronczyk’s argument (2009, p. 294) that,
in the post-Cold War era, the nation is often imagined as ‘an ensemble of
non-threatening fragments of culture, history, and geography’ rather than
a politicized entity run by an ideological dominator. In Contemporaries,
the nation is increasingly governed as a community of individuals who attach themselves to the idea of nationhood because of their shared hope and
Personal wealth, national pride
85
disappointment, not because of some collectivist norms imposed from outside. As such, the nation appears to be located within an ‘extra-political
zone of human relations’, to borrow Rose’s words (1999b, p. 167) about the
neoliberal logic of community building. As a result, the process of national
formation bypassed social and political mediation, such as activities organized by youth union or party politics, to employ a direct bonding to the
national fellows.
In her comment on the self-help discourse in American television talk
shows for women, Berlant (2008, p. x) coins the term ‘juxtapolitical’ to
describe the strategy of community formation in the age of neoliberalism. Berlant argues that the talk shows neither choose to be apolitical nor
­counter-political. Rather, these shows encourage the flourishing of women’s
communities in a way that ‘thrives in proximity to the political, occasionally
crossing over in political alliance, even more occasionally doing some politics, but most often not’ (2008, p. x, italics in original). In its relation to the
dominant structure, a ‘juxtapolitical’ project aims less at an explicit act of
political resistance than at providing intimate and empowering therapy to
the members of the self-formed community. Being ‘juxtapolitical’ does not
mean that the subjects fail to recognize their oppressed situation; by contrast,
it is precisely because they maintain no hope at all regarding the success of
both politics and counter-politics that a ‘juxtapolitical’ subject chooses a
personalized therapy to survive politics without explicit confrontation.
Although Berlant’s concept of ‘juxtapolitics’ is mainly concerned with the
affective structure of gendered discourse in America, this concept is useful to
explain the ‘weak’ position of Contemporaries in relation to the party state’s
domination. People who appeared on Contemporaries were chosen on the
basis of apolitical criteria, and appeared as non-political subjects because
the aim of the show was to let them raise their personal voices and to i­ nspire
viewers about their personal successes, as if such achievement was first and
­ iscourse
foremost a matter of self-transformation. This kind of personalized d
was not concerned with subverting the ongoing political domination of the
party state, and thus was not ‘counter-politics’. But the empowering effect of
Contemporaries did not totally evade the question of politics either ­because
the absence of political discussion was itself a critical reaction, albeit a tacit
one, to the politicizing party state. Instead of engaging in political dialogues,
the producers of Contemporaries turned politics into an unimportant f­ eature,
and subsequently granted it almost no visibility. While the show was not
resistant enough to cross the censorship boundary, it was also not so compromising as to simply parrot the agenda of the party state. The national
community in Contemporaries employed a strategy of community formation
based on what Berlant (2008, p. 10) calls a ‘relief from the political’, existing
more or less ‘next to’ the official political sphere in a combined mode of
­resistance and complicity. The blending of individualism and nationalism in
Contemporaries thus matched the logics of neoliberal community formation
while still well managed to evade existing political censorship.
86 Personal wealth, national pride
Selective logics of neoliberalism silently seeped into popular discourses
in Vietnam only because these logics were grounded in local settings, joining the existing repertoire of meanings that made sense to local people. In
­Contemporaries, the focus on self-improvement gave a fresh appeal to the
lasting legacy of nationalism, leaving behind the former collectivist norms
without disregarding the idea of patriotism as a whole. The reuse of existing nationalist values to legitimate neoliberal fantasy of individual will is
a ­productive governmental calculation. Nationalism has been the key focal
point of political, cultural, and academic discourses throughout the modern
history of Vietnam, long predating the socialist period but strongly escalated
during the socialist wars. General bonds to the nation have vibrant political
and cultural heritage, although the forms and purposes attached to them have
varied in from time to time. In Contemporaries, neoliberal practices made
selective use of the nationalist bonds that were compatible to market imperatives, while lessening the political potency once evident in socialist nationalism. ­Contemporaries demonstrates how neoliberal calculations usually take
local forms by reviving rather than rejecting old norms of social connections.
Contemporaries fits well into the emerging scholarship about ‘neoliberal nationalism’ or ‘commercial nationalism’ as an inherent component
of global capitalism (Dzenovska 2005; Özkan & Foster 2005; Volcic &
­Andrejevic 2011; Kania-Lundholm 2014). Here nationalism is not antithetical to global neoliberalism but rather is very dynamic. Commercial nationalism thrives in many contexts outside of the dominant Anglo-American
world: For example, in China (Li 2008; Barr 2012; Yang 2015), the former-­
Yugoslav republics (Volcic & Andrejevic 2009, 2011), Romania and Bulgaria
­(Kaneva & Popescu 2011), and Korea (Yang 2008), where local subjects
­appear particularly eager to compete in the name of their country. The main
actors of commercial nationalism are no longer politicians or legislators,
but enterprising agents who actively promote nationalist values to optimize
the productivity of national populations, to sell their products in the global
market, and to justify private profits. Commercial nationalism can work
outwardly to promote local distinctiveness among products, and to attract
investment in the global market. It can also direct inwardly to optimize the
productivity and consumption of domestic populations by transforming
national citizens into entrepreneurs or consumers. In Contemporaries, the
inward logic was more prominent, as this show mainly targeted the domestic
audience to encourage them to turn themselves into pro-market subjects.
In the coming section, I will first attend to the inward direction of Contemporaries by analyzing its stories of business success before turning to the
outward logic, which was also evident, albeit with slightly less priority.
The inward logic: Personal and national
In Contemporaries, business success was treated consistently as both an
individualist value and a nationalist responsibility. This promotion of
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87
wealth was fully compatible with the idea of ‘rich people, strong nation’
(dân giàu, nước mạnh) much propagated by the state after the Reform.
What interests me, however, is the way the show translated ‘rich people’
into ‘rich individuals’, thus transforming ‘the people’, a collective noun of
political ambiguity, into the specific guidance of ‘the self’. ‘The people’ is
an old concept of the mass much used by socialist rhetorics of collectivism,
which requires social solidarity and implies a uniform way of conducting
life. By contrast, the concept of ‘the self’ implies individual diversity and
uniqueness, and was given a new weight after the Reform as something
ultimately important in nation-building. The promotion of market-based
individualism added new thickness to the concept of self-cultivation that
had a long cultural and political history in Vietnam, particularly under the
influence of Confucian ethics and colonial modernization (Marr 2000).
In the 2000s, after decades of socialist condemnation, the idea of self-­
cultivation was enthusiastically reappropriated in public discourse, acquiring new cultural values that better suited the neoliberal fantasy of the
triumph of the will.
Each business guest appeared in Contemporaries as a self-run enterprise.
The nation was reimagined as the collective enterprise of millions of enterprising cells. The autonomy of each cell was not the opposite of national
government but rather its very power. In Contemporaries, self-­empowering
narratives of ‘never giving up’, ‘investing in yourself’, ‘thinking big’, ‘being your own boss’, ‘learning from your mistakes’, and ‘transforming your
destiny’ were juxtaposed systematically with nationalist terms such as
­‘Vietnamese brands’, ‘Vietnamese quality’, ‘the Vietnamese dream’, and
­‘Vietnamese values’. Here the national ran within the personal and the
­personal directly made up the national.
Let us return to the case of the ‘Vietnamese Coffee King’, Đặng Lê
Nguyên Vũ, who appeared at the start of this chapter. His Contemporaries
talk was broadcast on 19 February 2002 with the title ‘Bitter and Sweet’, implying the flavours of both coffee and life. Like many other business guests,
Vũ’s expertise in money-making was embroidered with his personal journey
of self-actualization. His narrative of the self was, in turn, enriched by his
ethical commitment to the nation. The nationalist appeal in Vũ’s story thus
employed a two-pronged translation between the personal and the market
and between the personal and the national.
The first translation between the personal and the market clearly demonstrated the neoliberal logic of autonomization. Vũ was born in 1971. His
coming of age coincided with the early years of the Reform, when he came
to Ho Chi Minh City to start his university life. Following the new ‘Reform
spirit’, he soon decided to quit his medical degree to open his own coffee
business. Ignoring his mother’s tears at this unusual decision, Vũ turned his
distaste for medicine into a new ‘lifelong passion’ for coffee. When the host
asked him whether his old friends at the medical school saw him as ‘abnormal’ for pursuing such a dream, he replied,
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Personal wealth, national pride
Yes, I think they did. If all you had was an old bicycle and all you
wanted was a giant Vietnamese coffee brand, you would look like a vain
dreamer. Some of my friends who are now doctors at Chợ Rẫy Hospital
and 115 Hospital used to see me that way. But now they laugh at me no
more.
(Người Đương Thời 2002)
In this statement, Vũ explained how he must believe in himself before he
could earn others’ trust. Although his mother and friends thought he was
insane, Vũ proved that a unique dream and strong inner motivation were
powerful enough to overcome outer judgements. During his talk, Vũ often
stressed the importance of learning to trust one’s own way of thinking, or
‘creative ideas’ (ý tưởng sáng tạo), which he saw as the only thing that human
beings can self-produce without any outside aid:
We must see ideas as the most special commodity. Look at my case, I had
nothing to start my business with but my own ideas … You can produce
endless ideas without the need for any kind of monetary investment or
exchange. The more unique ideas we have, the more ­opportunities for
this nation to develop better.
(Người Đương Thời 2002)
Here Vũ and the host were celebrating ‘creative ideas’ that were potentially
lucrative, the ideas that could be produced and sold, and that were far more
financially sustainable than money. They were using the language of economics to interpret human thoughts. Market competition was now applicable to the promotion of desirable citizenship. It is important to note that
Vũ tried to persuade his audience not just to cultivate an ambition to earn
more, but to maintain a strong ‘self’ as an inexhaustible inner resource.
Money-making is an art of self-building.
In explaining his success mainly as a matter of self-investment, Vũ evaded
the problem of social inequality as a pressing consequence of private accumulation and class conflicts in the post-Reform marketization. If getting
rich was fundamentally a matter of the creative self, then staying poor was
also a matter of inadequate self-management. The rhetoric went something
like this: Life is just not fair, so if your situation is not favourable, you’ve
got to change it by yourself. Contemporaries did not simply imply that the
inequality between the poor and the rich was a good thing, but that unfairness was inevitable, particularly in the context of Vietnam as a developing
country, and thus there was no point in complaining.
Vu’s discourse of individualist wealth was ethically justifiable precisely
because Vũ saw it as the ultimate weapon of the poor man, who had nothing but himself as an investment. As he urged viewers, ‘Look at my case,
I had nothing to start my business with but my own ideas’. Vũ hinted that
everyone, even the poorest person, could obtain similar success, as long as
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89
they learned to trust themselves and maximize their inner capacities. In
his narrative, money might not be equally distributed, but the confidence
in oneself and the freedom to be ‘creative’ were shared equally among both
the rich and the poor. Producing one’s unique thinking was thus the best
way, if not the only way, for unfortunate people to exit their disadvantaged
conditions.
When Vũ mentioned the problem of disadvantaged conditions, the personal and the national in his narrative were interconnected, and the second
logic of responsibilization was brought into effect. Vũ felt bonded to his
nation by the shared memory of its unfortunate past, and a shared responsibility for its better future. Personal stories of previous hardship, as evinced
in Vu’s narrative of deprived childhood and youth, were commonly found
in stories presented by other business guests in Contemporaries. The guests’
autobiographies of misery varied a great deal in their private details: Vũ
had nothing but his old bicycle; others had been child workers, orphans, or
uneducated. But what they all shared was a causal connection between the
shame of poverty before the Reform and the current ambition for business
success. More importantly, haunting memories of past destitution ethically
justified the guests’ ultimate desire for wealth in the name of national pride.
Money and prosperity were not just a matter of economic development, but
that of personal and collective dignity. Loan (personal communication,
26 February 2015) explained,
Before the Reform, Vietnamese people had to hide their money. Well,
it is just to say if they ever had any. Having chicken meat for meals was
already so luxurious that people must eat in secret. At that time, people
were taught that money was shameful and they should feel proud of
being poor. But when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s,
the poverty in Vietnam had reached its nadir. It was when we saw the
emergence of the new heroes who could fight against poverty for better
lives … I think Contemporaries only responded to the demand of the
whole society at that time, in the early 2000s, to recognize those who
dare to earn their legitimate wealth, and those who could build valuable
­Vietnamese brands, such as the case of Trung Nguyên Coffee.
In referring to the recent history of socialist deprivation to validate the role
of new business ‘heroes’, Loan saw the guests’ money-making efforts as not
only a rightful action but also an urgent task, an ethical responsibility of each
individual member of the nation. It was the only exit from the deep crisis of
socialist poverty. Being a media practitioner, Loan took the responsibility of
publicly honouring such an ethical task. As she argued, ­businesspeople who
‘dared’ to pursue their own business and succeed were worth celebrating
­because their achievements marked a clear departure from the misplaced
pride in poverty. The inevitable inequality of capitalist accumulation was
still far more desirable than the equality of socialist failure.
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Personal wealth, national pride
In his study of how the age of orthodox state-socialism is remembered in
the post-Reform era, MacLean (2008, p. 281) argues that memory of severe
hardship in the pre-Reform-subsidized economy can emotionally link ‘the
collectivism of the past with the individualism of the present’. A similar
­memorial practice is also performed in Contemporaries, when personalized
stories of shared misfortune in the recent past easily provoked empathy from
both the host and viewers. In inviting the guests to share their memories of
poverty and suffering, the producers of Contemporaries aimed at ‘touching
viewers’ hearts’, as one of the producers claimed (personal communication
with Trần Ngọc Minh, 2 March 2014). Such ‘heart-touching’ moments were
when viewers internalized stories on the television screen into their own
experience of hardship and survival. At those moments, the guests and their
viewers were bonded into the same imagined nation, which was conjured
into being in Contemporaries by the shared pain of poverty and shared aspirations for a better life to come.
The idea of ‘the nation’ in Contemporaries was mobilized to a different end from the previous nationalist socialist project. Nationalist appeals
in Contemporaries were aimed at individualizing collectivity, whereas socialist nationalism heavily collectivized its individual subjects. But while
­Contemporaries resolutely refused the socialist past of economic failure,
it actually inherited the nationalist legacy of recent socialist politics and
relocated such legacy within the new zone of money-making practices. The
irony is that it was precisely in the name of the nation that socialism could
achieve its ruling status before the Reform. Nationalism, as much as the
socialist politicization of all cultural and social sectors, was thus largely
responsible for the economic failure of the pre-Reform economy. This
fact, however, does not prevent the nation from maintaining its powers in
the post-Reform era. As the case of Contemporaries clearly demonstrates,
once the nation was released from the deficient regulation of the socialist
economy, it was restored to the more pristine realm of the self. Socialist
ideals might be totally out of fashion, but nationalism remains. By reaffirming the nationalist appeal with a personalizing twist, Contemporaries
naturalized and more deeply affirmed nationalist assumptions formerly
constructed by socialist politics.
At this point it is important to note that the personal freedom in bonding with the nation might have well existed during the time of orthodox
socialism, but it was hindered instead of mobilized by socialist cultural
government. The personalizing discourse in Contemporaries was thus not
only a matter of twisted rhetoric, but also a technical question of how
­t elevision made private attachment to the nation visible and governable.
As Rose (1999b, p. 175) argues, a new kind of community is formed only
when there are available technologies of community building. In other
words, a community ‘becomes governmental when it is made technical’ (Rose 1999b, p. 175). The genre of personality talk, which was only
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91
introduced to Vietnam after the Reform, allowed Contemporaries to turn
self-cultivating practices into a customizable way of living and thinking
that each viewing subject could apply to their own circumstance. In my
interviews, the producers of the show stressed many times that their aim
was to stimulate self-change instead of teaching viewers some uniform
way of living. One producer (personal communication with Tạ Minh
Phương, 27 July 2014) said,
We invited our guests to share their personal stories but this does not
mean that everyone should copy exactly what the guests did. Everyone
might see a part of themselves in the guests’ personal stories. Each one
will apply the message to her or his own circumstance in her or his own
ways.
The guests in Contemporaries were expected to use their own voices to present their particular experience. It was precisely thanks to the guests’ personal
and sometimes deeply intimate stories that Contemporaries could ‘inspire’
instead of imposing a new way of self-building upon a viewer’s mind. As the
aforementioned producer told us, she expected her viewers to ‘see a part of
themselves’ in the guests’ stories, to realize their own problems instead of
copying some ready-made lessons or merging into some homogenous mass
in the name of ‘the people’. When viewers recognized themselves in watching the show and consequently enfolded the guests’ guidance into their own
lives, they simultaneously chose to bond with the national community ethically endorsed by the guests. The show thus allowed viewers to rely on their
own reflection to decide whether or not to turn themselves into responsible
members of the national community. The reward for this attachment was
that they could imagine themselves as sharing the same community as the
guests, who were rich and respected. The national community conjured into
by Contemporaries had its own logic of exclusion because this community
only welcomed individuals with sufficient capacity to regulate their own life,
particularly the economic aspects. Whoever failed to take care of their life
should try harder if they were to receive respect equal to that afforded the
guests. The self-empowering discourse enabled by the genre of personality
talk allowed Contemporaries to operationalize the state’s idealized image of
the nation as a uniformed mass of ‘rich people’ into the shared community
of ‘enterprising selves’. The previous emphasis on state power was transformed into a practice of choice making and a promotion of personal will.
The outward logic: National and global
The case of Contemporaries demonstrates that the nation continued to be
an important concept in post-Reform Vietnam and that the mobilization of
national values was informed more by the logic of capitalist accumulation
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Personal wealth, national pride
than that of socialist moralism. This new modality of market nationalism
not only proved itself to be useful in mobilizing domestic populations in
the context of rapid economic development but also served as a productive
calculation in the global landscape.
In Contemporaries, Vietnam was reimagined as a collective enterprise
moving towards prosperity by competing with other nations in the international market. The nation remained an important community within
the global world, but not because the global was unattractive or should be
­resisted. By contrast, global qualities were often presented in the talk show
as a dream, something nice that had not happened to the nation, or at least
not yet in a desirable way. The term ‘the Vietnamese dream’ thus repeatedly
appeared in Contemporaries to encourage further economic advancement
into the global in the name of the nation. This global dream was precisely a
nationalist one.
If the inward logic of nationalist appeals in Contemporaries called for
self-advancement as an escape from socialist poverty, then such an endeavour became even more urgent in the face of global integration. Individuals
were bonded to the national community because of their shared memory of
the deprived past and by their anxiety for a future of global competition.
The nation’s low rank in the global market required more positive contributions from each and every individual because such a rank was a disqualification that all Vietnamese people must share. Again, the bonds between
the national and the personal were reinterpreted using market rather than
political terms.
The outward global logic of commercial nationalism in Contemporaries
relied heavily on the discourse of national belatedness, a product of the
­colonial era that still haunts the postcolonial world (Chakrabarty 2010). In
this case, being poor and being late were not purely a matter of money and
speed, but of some inner qualities directly linked with personal shame and
national insecurity. Vũ recalled his experience of being a Vietnamese person:
If you travel overseas, you will see that people there don’t have to care
about basic needs in their lives. So they can think bigger than us. The
gap between our country and others is too wide. Our generation must
try to show the world the image of Vietnam as not only a nation of ­heroic
wars, but also of wealth and talent. When a Japanese goes abroad, she
or he has self-confidence. But a Vietnamese could not feel such a similar
thing yet.
Here Vũ saw national belatedness as intrinsically leading to a problem of
the self, which becomes particularly acute when one was able to enjoy the
global mobility of ‘travelling overseas’. A Japanese person could feel more
self-secure simply because they were a citizen of an ‘advanced’ country. A
­Vietnamese person, on the other hand, did not have such a national advantage. The global world of spatial mobility was precisely where Vũ could
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93
see his deep attachment to his homeland. The sense of self-insecurity experienced by Vũ showed a psychological relationship between the individual
and the nation. This psychological connection, whether beneficial as in the
case of a Japanese person, or unsatisfactory as in the case of a ­Vietnamese,
was seen as innately given rather than as something one could adopt
­deliberately. The nation was thus imagined as a community of naturalized
micro-­relations rooted deeply within the realm of psychological ontology.
The feeling of insecurity when travelling oversea that Vũ declared in his
Contemporaries talk was understandable, if not totally realistic, given the
status of Vietnamese travellers. In 2017, a Japanese citizen could enter 172
countries without having to apply for a visa, while a Vietnamese could only
enter 45 countries, of which the majority were developing nations (Henley &
Partners 2017). Vũ thus made a point when he hinted that a Vietnamese
passport did not promise many opportunities for its carrier to engage with
the global world.
Still, as Vũ argued, Vietnamese individuals could actively improve their
predestined nationality by contributing to the national future. Vũ urged
members of the younger generation to advance their own careers, and by doing so to raise their self-confidence and to ‘show the world’ a better national
brand. In her analysis of neoliberal branding culture, Banet-Weiser (2012,
p. 9) reminds us that branding is not simply an economic matter because a
good brand can trigger hope and assuage anxiety as it connects its subjects
in an imagined space ‘in which individuals feel safe, secure, relevant and
authentic’. The national branding logic advocated by Contemporaries was
inseparable from the intimate space of cultural recognition and self-dignity.
National branding was envisioned as a two-way process in Contemporaries. On the one hand, the nation served as an always available source of
cultural imprint to give each product its unique ‘Việt quality’. Contemporaries showcased a good number of Vietnamese companies that successfully
sold local products such as foods, beverages, ceramics, crafts, fashions,
and tourist services to the global market using national branding. National
­distinction was discussed not only as a cultural marker but more importantly as a strategy of a peripheral nation to sell exotic local products to foreign customers. On the other hand, the success of a Vietnamese company in
the global market would, in turn, contribute to the wealth and the image of
the nation. The promotion of a national brand was thus a practical marketing strategy and an ethical responsibility of businesspeople. Again, the urge
of national branding was underlined by the assumption of the country’s
­belatedness because national branding was seen as a shortcut for ­companies
from a small and underdeveloped country like Vietnam to gain more visibility and distinctiveness in the international market.
The nationalist anxiety about global competition was best illustrated
through the case of Lâm Tấn Lợi, who appeared on Contemporaries on 7
June 2004. Lợi came to share his numerous struggles in turning himself from
a destitute man into a millionaire. As viewers were told, Lợi once worked
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Personal wealth, national pride
as a mechanic in several state-owned companies, where he found himself
unable to cope with bureaucracy and finally became jobless. Not giving up,
he invented his own foldable hammocks, sold many of them, established his
own company, and became rich. One day, he found out that several oversea companies had registered their names for the patent of his hammock.
The company in Japan then accused Lợi of stealing his own patent, and
­requested that he either stop ongoing contracts in Japan or pay the company
a copyright fee for each hammock exported to this market. Lợi decided to
sue the company in Japan and America, and finally won. He had his copyright protected in these two large markets, which was critically important
for the future of his export business.
In the show, Lợi appeared as a very humble and almost a shy person (he
actually needed sedative medication beforehand to stay calm), and the host
treated him as the living image of David defeating Goliath. When the host
asked how he ‘dared to do such a thing that not many Vietnamese businesspeople have the courage to try’, he replied, ‘I dare because I profoundly
­believed that if I did the right thing, justice would be on my side’ (Người
Đương Thời 2004). The host went on to conclude that Lợi was defending
his rightful ownership of his patent, but that he also provided an exemplary
case of how Vietnamese brands should actively protect themselves in the
global market. As new players, Vietnamese traders should be more conscious of learning the new rules and should have no fear in entering the free
trade world. The ‘daring spirit’ repeatedly appeared in Contemporaries to
foster risk-taking entrepreneurship, but also to emphasize shared worries
over the unfavourable conditions of the nation.
The case of Lợi being active in protecting his Vietnamese brand suggested to viewers that national promotion should be a self-aware practice
of each citizen in their daily business, rather than an empty slogan. One
of the producers (personal communication with Bùi Thị Lan Hương, 28
­February 2014) explained how she conceptualized the role of Contemporaries in activating such self-awareness:
Globalisation, let’s say the WTO, for example, is not just a big abstract
thing. Vietnam joined the WTO but we cannot force Vietnamese people
to join it too. So in Contemporaries, we invited the guests to help our
viewers understand that big things must start with very small things. If
everyone tries a bit each day, then these small contributions will make
this small nation better each day.
This producer saw globalization as a nationalist task. Given the small size of
the nation, this task was burdensome, and it thus required the effort, small
or big, of each and every citizen. She thus envisioned Contemporaries as a
public television programme that allowed such nationalist responsibility to
be better understood by Vietnamese individuals. Each person should realize
their own role in the promotion of their nation within the global world, and
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95
actively perform the national brand by increasing their self-esteem and their
career success. Only by doing so would each individual become an ‘unofficial ambassador’ of their poor homeland, just as Forbes had favourably
entitled Vũ and his coffee brand (Harris 2012, p. 2).
The anxiety of belatedness in Contemporaries was an old product of the
colonial project, when the French came to Vietnam with their ‘civilising mission’ to advance the colonized people from barbarism to progressive modernity. The ‘indisputable historical belatedness’ in many countries, as Gandhi
(1998, p. 6) reminds us, still shapes the way we imagine the world and build
our own sense of self-confidence. But the awareness of national belatedness
in Contemporaries nonetheless aimed to positively engage rather than criticize the global order. Although backwardness was seen as an unfavourable
historical trait given to all Vietnamese people, the global market was fair.
Competition offered an equal chance to all determined risk-takers. As long
as we ‘dared’ to try, we still had opportunities to realize our dream, to turn
belatedness into a new beginning. Many business guests of Contemporaries
proved by their own living examples that the disadvantaged context could
itself serve as a source of self-motivation and resilience. As the host of Contemporaries concluded in her talk with Vũ, ‘This world belongs to those who
dare to dream’. In Contemporaries, the future of the Vietnamese nation and
its citizens was not doomed in the global era, but left with the choices still to
be made by each national fellow.
The example of Contemporaries confirms Sassen’s argument about the
inherent entanglement of the global and the national, which is often overlooked in the literature on globalization. As Sassen (2006, p. 1) argues,
‘the epochal transformation we call globalisation is taking place inside the
­national to a far larger extent than is usually recognized’. Ong, through
­various examples from Asian markets, also stresses that neoliberalism can
only achieve its globalizing effect, thanks to its adaptability to local contexts. In Ong’s words (2007, p. 5), ‘neoliberal logic is best conceptualized
not as a standardized universal apparatus, but a migratory technology of
governing that interacts with situated sets of elements and circumstances’.
Global transformations are experienced first and foremost at the local, if
not banal, level of daily living. In the case of Vietnam, the nation continues
to provide an intimate sense of locality that allows Vietnamese subjects to
make use of various transformations that are simultaneously transnational.
At the same time, the idea of the nation also helps make sense of and resist
the disparities between the so-called ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ worlds,
providing hope and dignity for those who see themselves as the left-behind
subjects. There are thus always connections and disconnections, complicity
and resistance, convergence and difference between the national and the
global. The relationship between the national and the global is less about
differentiating one from another than identifying how the national is constantly changing to adapt to (and sometimes to challenge) the global, and
how the global runs both inside and outside the national.
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Personal wealth, national pride
In their analysis of neoliberalism in China, Ong and Zhang (2008) argue that the Chinese state could well regulate the neoliberal tendency.
Rather than rejecting neoliberal calculations, the Chinese state represents
the new model of ‘socialism from afar’, which means that the state retains
its authoritarian rule by selectively fostering neoliberal capitalism only in
a number of limited zones. But while the attention to Asian exceptions of
neoliberalism offers an insightful way to resist the idea of neoliberalism as
globally homogenous, the model of ‘socialism from afar’ might not explain
the case of Vietnam. At least in the sphere of popular and new media, the
control of the Vietnamese state over the neoliberalizing process has been
much less effective than that of the Chinese state. Consider, for example,
how the Chinese state proves itself to master the art of setting the platforms
for new media activities. Chinese authorities successfully ban Google and
Facebook, two vital media technologies of global neoliberalism, over a huge
territory and population. In contrast, the Vietnamese state has never been
able to maintain an effective firewall over the Internet, except for selective
attempts to breakdown dissident voices or to ban social networks for a short
period at times of ‘sensitive’ political issues. In China, domestic search engine like Baidu and domestic social media network like Weibo are dominant, whereas in Vietnam, Google and Facebook virtually take over the
whole market. Vietnamese television is also subject to a much smaller scale
of top-down control, when the state has significantly withdrawn itself from
funding television, leaving the market to be the primary regulator of the
entertainment sector. Although the sphere of political media is controlled
by the Vietnamese state, popular and social media are subject to the global
media market in ways that are much less governed by top-down rule than in
the case of Chinese media.
My analysis of Contemporaries aligns with Schwenkel and Leshkowich’s
argument (2012) that socialist politics in Vietnam is more compatible than
conflictive with neoliberal logics. Socialist politics and neoliberal expansion are not mutually exclusive, although they might not always be directly
relevant. The emergence of commercial nationalism does not secure the
­dismissal of political violence justified by the socialist rhetoric of patriotism. At the same time, neoliberalism is far from being a deliberate project of
the late-socialist state. More often, the logics of neoliberalism are selectively
adopted, and blended seamlessly into local settings, adding more tension
and oddities to the so-called ‘market economy with a socialist orientation’.
The case of Contemporaries also confirms MacLean’s argument (2013) that
the Vietnamese state generally lacks the capacity to maintain its centralized governance at the practical level and thus leaves considerable space
of flexibility for local actors to pursue their own agendas as long as these
appear politically non-threatening. When a contingent network of media
technologies and local actors allows, the process of national formation can
simultaneously work as an effective project of neoliberal capitalism without erasing the lingering legacy of socialist nationalism. It is thus more
Personal wealth, national pride
97
critically enabling to focus on nationalism as a flexible form of cultural government that could adapt to the new impulses of the market as much as
stay tuned with the old legacy of socialism. Rather than trying to predict
whether neoliberal nationalism in Vietnam represents ‘neoliberalism at a
distance’ or ‘socialism from afar’, this chapter has a much more modest goal
in focussing on one local example to show that the answer is more ambivalent than definitive.
5
Collective wound, private
healing
The end of the Second Indochina War in 1975 marked the victory of the
communist North and the traumatic experience of many Southerners. But
in Vietnam, this historic event has been concertedly celebrated solely as a
Northern triumph. The fact that the collapse of Saigon led to the deaths and
the separation of thousands of people is almost completely unacknowledged
in the Vietnamese public discourses. Such an absence of Southern political
victimhood was curiously addressed when As if We Never Parted, a famous
reality show on the political channel VTV1, broadcasted more than ten live
shows starting from 2007, presenting painful stories of missing Southerners
during and after the collapse of Saigon. As if We Never Parted also featured
other tragic events in the recent past of Vietnam, such as the missing cases
happening during migrations, the haunting memory of famine victims, or
the lasting consequence of warfare across the whole nation. In so doing, As
if We Never Parted has turned the national past into a background for multiple collective tragedies experienced by losers and winners alike, replacing
the common theme of revolutionary heroism with a new focus on previously
silenced traumas.
The work of As if We Never Parted raises questions about the reconceptualization of the national past in mainstream Vietnamese media. What has
led to such a shift from the glorious idea of socialist patriotism to the traumatic image of the vulnerable victims of politics? How are new media experiments involved and new technologies of cultural government deployed to
turn trauma into the new index of national fraternity? What are the political
implications indicated by this new focus on political tragedies? Does the
new attention to the wounds of the past hint at a prospect of political healing, or does it imply a new way of mobilizing national subjects in the name
of reconciliation?
In this chapter, I explore how As if We Never Parted serves as a working site
of neoliberal biopower instead of socialist sovereignty. The genre of reality
allows As if We Never Parted to work as a technology of affect, which governs
the private feelings of national citizens by provoking their affective engagement with past national tragedies. In publicizing muted catastrophes through
intimate stories told by real victims, As if We Never Parted offers participatory
Collective wound, private healing 99
opportunities for ordinary citizens to voice up their tragedies and to heal their
own pain. But in reducing past tragedies to a matter of personal experience,
As if We Never Parted also promotes the prospect of healing as only achievable at the scale of intimate feeling while leaving intact the continuity and
expansion of political and social injustice under capitalist privatization. As
if We Never Parted thus treats the wounds of the socialist past, but inevitably
embraces neoliberal remedies based on privatized compassion.
Separated in wars, reunited on television
As if We Never Parted is a well-known Vietnamese reality show that reunites missing people. At its launch in 2007, As if We Never Parted quickly
attracted public attention thanks to the established fame of its founder and
host, Nguyễn Phạm Thu Uyên, one of the most prominent female personalities of post-Reform television. Over the last ten years and on a monthly
basis, As if We Never Parted has maintained its appeal by using real stories of missing people to attract affective responses from viewers. Up to the
end of 2017, As if We Never Parted had received the surprising number of
70,000 search requests in total and had enabled nearly 800 real-life reunions. ­A lmost all reunions on As if We Never Parted are of intimate blood
­relations, typically orphans searching for parents, parents looking for lost
children, or siblings finding each other. These people were mostly separated
due to major catastrophes in the recent history of Vietnam, such as the
First and Second Indochina Wars, domestic and cross-continent waves of
­m igration, and the condition of extreme poverty both before and after the
Reform.
A case of reunion in As if We Never Parted always starts when a person
who is looking for a missing relative sends a request to the programme. It is
vital that a family member directly submits the request because this evinces
the commitment of the family and provides intimate details and needed
contact for further investigation. The request can be lodged through the
programme’s hotline number, its website, a PO box, or an official email.
Selected requests are announced in the live shows by a televisual combination of biographical narrative, testimonies, and available photos. Many
announcements are presented by the family members themselves, while
others are narrated over relevant pictures and describing texts. Viewers are
expected to call the hotline if they have any clues about the cases shown. A
team of professional detectives analyzes all the data provided by the families
and the public, and then physically tracks the missing people across possible
localities. This search team is technically supported by police institutions,
local authorities, DNA testers, and a large network of volunteers. When a
missing person is finally located, the television producers will build the scenario for the show around the search journey, making observational footage
and travelogues, and then inviting the missing person and their family to the
studio, where the final reunion is broadcast live.
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Collective wound, private healing
The live show is set in a small studio resembling a cosy living room. The
studio audience is seated very close to the well-lit stage, on which there are
a small table and several chairs. Family members are intermingled with the
audience and just walk a few steps onto the stage when invited by the host.
The missing people are often kept in a separate room, where they can watch
the show without being seen by their family. Neither the family members nor
viewers are informed about the final result until the last minute when the
missing person and their family are led towards each other from ­opposite
sides of the stage. At the confronting moment in front of the camera, most
of the reunited people perform the expected reactions: Hugging, holding
hands, touching cheeks, and, most typically, weeping. With the tearful scene
of the ‘happy ending’ displayed at last, a case of a missing person is officially
closed.
The stable format of As if We Never Parted over the last ten years has
allowed viewers to learn what to expect from a show. This monthly ritual
presents several real reunions on the stage, plenty of sad testimonies, series
of vintage photos, a lot of emotional chatting, extensive elaboration by travelogues, and most spectacularly, a great many tears. In each reunion, the
producers structure the live interviews and the observational footages into
a coherent narrative of family lost and found. Ordinary dialogues blended
with strong emotional expression become the predominant mode of storytelling. At the moment of reunion, the hosts, the participants, and the studio
audience are often shown trembling in tears. With so much weeping, As
if We Never Parted has established its reputation as one of the most ‘tear-­
provoking’ television shows in Vietnam (Ma 2013).
As acknowledged by Thu Uyên (personal communication, 9 March 2014),
the theme of missing people in As if We Never Parted was inspired by the
Russian famous reality show Wait For Me, but As if We Never Parted is not a
franchised format. The organization of search activities and the production
of the live show are designed by Vietnamese television producers to match
local taste and production condition. In late 2007, As if We Never Parted
was launched at the same time as the triumphant arrival of global reality
formats in Vietnam. As of mid-2018, As if We Never Parted remains a rare
domestic reality show that has withstood competition from many global
programmes, such as Vietnam Idol, The Voice, Dancing with the Stars, Vietnam Amazing Race, and Master Chef. These global products do not seem
to clash with As if We Never Parted because the former mainly focusses on
the fame game of celebrity, while the latter builds its reputation on philanthropic accountability. The imported formats have indeed earned far more
fame and profit, but As if We Never Parted has so far maintained its financial
autonomy thanks to stable sponsorship and advertisement. In 2010, As if
We Never Parted confirmed its influence by transferring its format to Cambodia, when the Vietnamese producers helped their Cambodian colleagues
start the same programme in Phnom Penh under the name It’s Not a Dream
(Võ 2009).
Collective wound, private healing 101
The public display of trauma is the key strategy that turns As if We Never
Parted into a working site of affect because the representation of trauma
can provoke intense bodily engagement from both participants and viewers
of the show. The producers systematically portray family separation as a
kind of psychological and emotional damage that darkens the whole lives
of the victims. This traumatic assumption is implied in the regular use of
terms such as ‘lifelong tragedy’, ‘the forever wound at heart’, ‘the unrelievable pain’, or ‘permanent obsession’ and through the constant inducement of
sadness and tears. All As if We Never Parted live shows are filled with heartbreaking stories about familial misfortune: A mother crying day and night
for decades after the kidnap of her baby daughter, a father going insane
from the guilt of losing his small son, a Vietnamese–American orphan desperate for a hug from his unknown Vietnamese mother. All cases of missing
people hint at an extreme state of insecurity, a perpetual hope of reunion,
and a haunting obsession of disrupted memories. It is thus not only the missing of the persons, but also the traumatic feelings induced by the event of
their missing that serves as the key focus of As if We Never Parted.
The effect of traumatic stories in As if We Never Parted works in a similar manner to that of the melodramatic narratives in television serials,
demonstrating how reality show combines the power of drama with that of
documentary genres. Melodramatic imagination, as Ang (1985, pp. 44–5)
argues, is involved with emotional response more than with rational, cognitive perception. This kind of emotional effect stems from a soap opera’s
‘tragic structure of feeling’, which is based on ‘a contrast between misery
and happiness’ (Ang 1985, p. 46). The ‘ups’ and ‘downs’ of characters’ lives
are constantly featured: Happiness never lasts, but there is always hope for
better times, even during the worst of miseries. The fictional nature of a
soap opera does not prevent a viewer from feeling ‘realistic’, something Ang
(1986, p. 41) calls ‘emotional realism’. In this sense, As if We Never Parted
also has its own tragic structure of feeling by presenting endless stories
about the pain of missing and the joy of reunion. The difference is that As
if We Never Parted is enriched with the power of witnessing, or a promise
of authenticity which is much less prominent in a soap opera. As Hill (2002,
p. 323) states, reality television allows a distinctive viewing practice in which
‘audiences look for the moment of authenticity when real people are “really”
themselves in an unreal environment’. Such an act of witnessing is highly
affective, not only because of the effect of ‘emotional realism’, but because
the bodies of participants have become crucial sites for viewers to scan for
authentic moments of ‘the real’. It is thus not only the melodrama-like stories, but also the actual bodily movements of participants that contribute to
the tragic structure of feeling in As if We Never Parted.
The affective scenes of private trauma enabled by the genre of reality television are vital to the searching function of As if We Never Parted, which
differentiate this project from other practices of identifying and reuniting
missing people. As if We Never Parted does not simply describe dry facts
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Collective wound, private healing
about the missing cases as the police or social workers often do; instead,
it presents each situation as a touching account of a real-life tragedy. This
difference is critical because the contagious nature of affect allows the show
to perform powerful uniting function unachievable by traditional search
practices. The traumatic narratives, once appearing on national television,
exert a strong affective capacity upon a large number of viewers. The televised traumas thus call into being a network of affected actors driven by
their compassion and empathy, typically the phoning-in viewers, the sponsors, the volunteers, and other institutions whose instruction and labour
productively optimize the chance of success in finding the missing persons.
The televised traumas bond these actors into a temporary working unity
that brings together information, human resources, and financial support to
increase the chance of a successful search. The production of trauma thus
serves as a strategic element that turns this reality show into a feasible and
effective project of reunion.
But the effect of trauma in As if We Never Parted is not limited to the
practical function of searching; it also extends to the public conceptualization of the nation. Renan reminds us that national belonging is deeply based
on the collective feelings of ‘having suffered, enjoyed, and hoped together’,
and the part of suffering is always more vital than that of enjoyment (19).
Renan’s insight well suits the case of As if We Never Parted, where television
allows the viewing subjects to bond themselves to the national community
of pain and to seek therapeutic healing based on the affect of empathy and
love. Once shown on television, the individual traumas of missing people
are implicated in a collective understanding of national tragedies because it
is through national struggles that these people were lost, and it is via a national television programme that they are found. As if We Never Parted thus
not only presents the tragic experience of missing people, but also turns the
public concept of nationhood into a traumatic one.
Presenting a tragic connection between the personal and the national is a
deliberate strategy in As if We Never Parted. The people who went missing
due to national events receive most preference among the total 70,000 search
requests received. As if We Never Parted has spent a great deal of time reuniting families separated during the brutal fall of Saigon in 1975, various
migration waves throughout the twentieth century, multiple mass killings
during the Second Indochina War, and other tragic events directly related
to past national turbulence. The heavy historical legacy of the nation can
instantly give temporal and spatial familiarities to the otherwise unrelated
cases of separation, adding ethical significance to the prospect of healing.
The nation thus provides a convenient public grid of intelligibility and emotionality to make sense of private traumas across time and space.
The case of As if We Never Parted demonstrates how trauma always implies certain practices of power. Trauma can affect the way we feel and act,
and can also create or transcend the differences between ourselves and others. As Edkins (2003, p. 4) argues, the ‘practice of trauma’ shapes the making
Collective wound, private healing 103
of the self as part of the relationship among selves. In her words, ‘Events
seen as traumatic seem to reflect a particular form of intimate bond between
personhood and community and, most importantly, they expose the part
played by relations of power’ (Edkins 2003, p. 4). Trauma is thus never simply a ‘natural’ reality waiting for representation. An event seen as traumatic
within this network of power relation might appear non-­traumatic in another network. In other words, an event, whether personal or national, must
be made traumatic based on some specific deployment of power relations
that responds to a certain tendency in subject formation. What is interesting
about the deployment of trauma in As if We Never Parted is that it manifests
a rare departure from the mantra of nationalist glory long reiterated by the
Vietnamese media. In order to understand the focus on trauma in As if We
Never Parted, we first need to relocate the show within the existing politics
of trauma in Vietnam.
From resisting sovereignty to practising biopower
Trauma, particularly political trauma, has long been excluded from mainstream discourses in mainland Vietnam. This exclusion reflects the direct
legacy of a socialist discipline that radically pursued collective glory at the
expense of private feelings (Zinoman 2001b; Vu 2014). During the period of
orthodox socialism and particularly at the peak of the Second Indochina
War, personal suffering was only acknowledged as wilful devotion to the
heroic cause of nationalist socialism. Individuals were thus banned from
­expressing or complaining about their personal pain, and traumas were
logically non-existent in the party state’s view. Instead of focussing on the
tragic consequences of warfare and revolution upon individual lives, the socialist public culture honoured the sacrifice of the personal, rendering the
unpronounced pain as exemplary devotion. As de Tréglodé (2012, p. 36)
points out in his study of Vietnamese heroes, in the age of state socialism,
‘the morality of a new man lay in his self-sacrifice for the good of the nation’.
Put in the words of Lê Duẩn, the former General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, ‘the revolutionary differs from the nonrevolutionary
in that he knows to forget himself for the service of the collectivity’ (quote
in ­Malarney 2007, p. 49). Public revelation of personal trauma was thus
seen as inherently coward and corrupting, as it lessened the greatness of the
nationalist/socialist cause and provoked harmful doubt about the Party’s
leadership. As such, socialist politics did not only ignore tragic stories of
the enemy, but also silenced the private suffering of socialist subjects in the
name of nationalist sacrifice.
The absence of recognition of political trauma continues in the present
time, even when the party state has slackened its control over many other
public topics. Censorship over the re-examination of historic events remains
strict, and bloggers are frequently arrested if they circulate criticism of the
prestige of the Communist Party, whether in the past or the present. In 2006,
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Collective wound, private healing
the state issued Decree No. 56 confirming that it was a civil violation to
‘deny the revolutionary achievements’ with a penalty of up to 30 million
Vietnamese dongs (Chính Phủ Việt Nam 2006). In this context, contemporary Vietnamese media, while gradually extending their critical coverage
of many economic, social, and cultural problems, continue to stay away
from questioning any political tragedies that can potentially defame socialist glory. The absence of trauma thus represents a typical and long-lasting
taboo in the Vietnamese public sphere.
The party state’s coercive erasure of traumas evinces what Foucault (2003e,
pp. 168, 239–40) terms the ‘juridical model of sovereign power’, in which subjects are governed mainly through the repressive mechanism of p
­ unishment
and exclusion. The key feature of sovereign power is its high concentration of
force (to kill, to seize, to torture), which is driven by the centralized intention
of the ruler, who seeks passive obedience from the governed subjects. As
Foucault (2003d, p. 241) famously puts it, sovereignty is essentially about the
‘right to kill’, the power to ‘take’ instead of to ‘make life’. But by focussing
on limited zones of identified rebellion, sovereign power i­ nevitably lacks the
capacity to govern extended social spaces that appear politically unthreatening. Foucault (2003d, p. 36) thus stresses that the model of sovereignty exerts
an ‘absolute expenditure of power, but … cannot calculate power with minimum expenditure and maximum efficiency’. In the case of Vietnam, ­juridical
sovereignty works most effectively during V
­ ietnamese socialist warfare,
when the threat of mass killing allowed the party state to reduce the whole
social field to a zone of militarized subjection. The legacy of such sovereign
practice is found easily in the post-Reform era, but now it is directed mainly
to protect the party state’s political privilege.
It is precisely due to the blunt exclusion performed by the party state that
trauma has become an important point of resistance for dissidents. The
revelation of political trauma is blatant in the ‘unofficial’ channels, such
as interpersonal communication, personal blogs, online memoirs, and offshore publications, which the censorship system fails to suppress. In this
­counter-political sphere of dissident voices, the mentioning of s­ ilenced
political tragedies, for instance, the re-education camp in the South ­after
the Second Indochina War (Huy Đức 2013), the tragic journey of boat
­people (Thanh Trúc 2015), or the policing system of the party state against
­Reformist artists (Tô 2009), is driven by the political motivation to expose
socialist violence, demystify the ‘sacred war’, and enlighten people about the
historical treachery of the current regime. Trauma thus achieves the status
of a marginalized discourse, and serves primarily as a means of political
struggle against the dictatorship of the party state.
Paradoxically, the prolonged antagonism between the party state and the
dissidents regarding the public status of trauma confirms a crucial commonality between these two opposing parties: Their assumption of socialist
sovereignty, for better or worse, as the principal mode of power practised
throughout the recent history of Vietnam. On the side of the ruler, the party
Collective wound, private healing 105
state maintains its intention to manipulate national citizens by the old techniques of punishment and restriction. On the side of the opposition, the
political activists also see the party state as the only worthy problem regarding the political landscape in Vietnam, consequently turning the party
state into the most privileged target of resistance. The activists’ concern
with top-down censorship is well advocated by the academic discourse
about ­Vietnamese media. As I argued in previous chapters, the state-­
centred ­approach is still dominant in studies of Vietnamese media, in which
the media are mainly defined by their relationship with state power, and
thus are reduced to an instrument of or against the party state. In relying
on the model of repressive sovereignty, the state-centred approach shared
by the party state and the dissidents alike tends to isolate the party state
from the much diversified and decentralized network of power relations
emerging after the Reform.
The model of state sovereignty can no longer explain the circulation of
trauma in the post-Reform era, such as in the case of As if We Never Parted.
In saying this, I do not imply that the activists’ attempts to use trauma as a
political means to ‘cut off the king’s head’, to borrow Foucault’s metaphor
about sovereignty (1990, pp. 88–9), are unworthy. What I mean is that these
attempts might have granted too much power to the prohibitive figure of
the party state, thus ignoring how the new context of marketization and privatization has allowed power to be productively dispersed and to multiply
far beyond the restricted zone of ‘the king’. In post-Reform Vietnam, the
proliferation of media channels, genres, and content has enabled alternative spaces where minority groups can make their sufferings known without
necessarily being politically active. A practice of trauma is no longer only
about protecting or resisting the party state but also about how ordinary
individuals turn themselves into subjects of trauma in their own terms. The
presence of trauma is thus more a matter of ‘life making’, an effort to release
and heal one’s own wound, than of ‘life taking’. So while the model of sovereignty is still present in Vietnam today, this model is no longer the only
concern in practices of trauma and is far from being the most significant and
interesting one.
The ordinary space of ‘life making’ outside the elite zone of juridical sovereignty is precisely where As if We Never Parted is situated. As if We Never
Parted sidesteps political values, instead enabling and amplifying the affective capacity of trauma in regulating the world of private and ordinary feelings, thus evincing the practice of biopower rather than sovereignty. Such
display of authentic trauma appears politically benign, if not sentimentally
‘weak’ because it does not pay much attention to opposing the repressive
ruler. Rather, the show’s affective logic seeks to reproduce banal feelings of
vulnerability outside the exclusive domain of the sovereign. When As if We
Never Parted brings tears to viewers’ eyes, viewer’s bodies and their private
sphere of living are exposed to the regulation of biopolitics, in which ‘biological existence’ is ‘reflected in political existence’ (Foucault 1990, p. 142).
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Collective wound, private healing
The capacity to reach the mass audience, but also to attend to the private
feelings of each individual viewer, permits As if We Never Parted to govern the national subjects in a ‘retail’ manner, significantly departing from
the ‘wholesale’ manner of orthodox socialism. Biopower thus permits the
extensive publicization of traumas through privatized engagement without
falling into the binary options of being either ‘for’ or ‘against’ the party
state. This explains why As if We Never Parted has hardly faced any serious
censorship over the last ten years, despite its extensive elaboration of sensitive political pain.
Affective experiments: Embodying the weary nation
In the previous chapter, I used the case of Contemporaries to examine the
neoliberalization of nationalist discourse on Vietnamese popular media,
in which the privatizing force of commercial nationalism is replacing the
collectivizing logic of socialist nationalism. The genre of personality talk
allows Contemporaries to facilitate a direct link between the aspiration for
personal achievement and that of national prosperity, thus ethically bonding the personal with the national through voluntary responsibility instead
of political obligation, as was commonly seen during the time of orthodox
socialism. The idea of the nation is thus increasingly transferred from the
sphere of politics to an alternative space of intimate community formation.
The personalization of national attachment indicates how neoliberal technology has allowed the norms of nationhood to bypass political mediation
to directly shape individual selves.
As if We Never Parted shares the logic of privatized nationhood with
Contemporaries, but in the former, the privatizing force is greatly intensified because the genre of reality television allows As if We Never Parted to
reach more deeply into the intimate sphere of personal affect. Seigworth and
Gregg (2010, p. 2) argue that affect is ‘a gradient of bodily capacity’, which
is involved with ‘visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than
conscious knowing’. So, in affecting viewers’ feeling, As if We Never Parted
entwines the corporeal with the national, whereas Contemporaries focusses
more on the cognitive link between self-promotion and national pride. As
if We Never Parted thus works upon the privatization of the ownership of
cultural and historical values, while Contemporaries engages more explicitly
with the capitalist problem of money-making. The affective work of As if
We Never Parted indicates that Vietnamese television has increasingly infiltrated the social field at the bodily level. In this instance, affect has become
a new object–target of cultural government, when national television as a
technology of mass distribution is combined with the subjects’ affective self-­
making. Here what the idea of the nation offers is not a shared political goal
or a shared hope of a prosperous future, but a communal space of traumatic
familiarity and therapeutic recognition that adds collective significance to
private feelings of vulnerability. Instead of being an outer political entity
Collective wound, private healing 107
to which national subjects ideologically enlist or resist, the nation now becomes an inner part of the feeling self without which the subject would fail
to make sense of their traumatized body and soul. The function of traumas
in As if We Never Parted is thus to enable intimate collectivity, not political
alliance, among strangers as national citizens.
In As if We Never Parted, the traumatic link between the personal and
the national appears as congenial, a kind of taken-for-granted assumption
where the sad history of the nation is internalized into individual tragedies
of family separation. The idea of the traumatic past of the nation is often
ignored by the party state, but such an idea deeply informed my interviews
with As if We Never Parted producers. As Thu Uyên (personal communication, 9 March 2014, emphasis added) explained,
I travelled a lot when I was working on news and current affairs.
­Everywhere I went, there were stories of missing and separation. In each
village, there was always this family whose son died in the war or that
family whose relative went missing. It is very sad, extremely sad! And
not much has been done about this … So I longed to do a television
program about these prolonged cases of separations. I wanted to do
something real, something helpful in responding to the latent problem
of missing people in Vietnam. I think As if We Never Parted is really
about a ruined country, so ruined.
Thu Uyên became emotionally acquainted with various strangers across localities and generations because she saw herself as sharing their c­ ollective
destiny: All were weary citizens under the historical burden of an unfortunate homeland. Thu Uyên, in feeling sad about her ‘ruined country’, had
­already embedded the national history into her affective encounters with
her unlucky compatriots. In this way, the nation had become a site of biopolitics in which nationality was directly enfolded with affective individuality. Although Thu Uyên was implicitly hinting at the lack of systemic
effort directed towards healing the country (‘not much has been done about
this’), she did not bother much with the language of political blaming.
­Instead, she considered herself as an agent of change, motivated first and
foremost by her personal affection rather than on behalf of any political or
social programmes. She thus initiated As if We Never Parted as ‘something
real, something useful’, understood as her practical and timely contribution
to soothe the immanent pain of the unlucky families and also to cure the injured homeland. Her assumption about the ‘ruined country’ and her vision
of vulnerable citizenship served to justify her personal ethics as well as her
televisual show’s emotional worthiness.
The task of fleshing out the latent pain of the ‘ruined country’, however,
is not only a matter of ethical urgency, as Thu Uyên imagined, but more
importantly a matter of technological availability. In other words, the question of ‘why’ is less curious than that of ‘how’ this reality show addresses
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Collective wound, private healing
the ‘everywhere’ sorrow of the nation that had remained invisible or unspeakable. This task is only feasible when the programme can access new
techniques that can make tangible and governable the ordinary and latent
sufferings of ‘this family’ and ‘that family’ without having to rely on a political voice to speak on their behalf.
The question of ‘how’ explains why it was only in 2007 that As if We Never
Parted was realizable in Vietnam, despite the fact that the affective impulse to
heal the ‘ruined country’ might well have been felt not only by Thu Uyên but
also by many other nationalist media practitioners. Around this time, there was
a rapid expansion of broadband Internet in many parts of Vietnam (Trần 2011),
and television had reached all corners of the nation. Reality television had also
become more familiar to both producers and viewers as part of the proliferation
of ordinary television since the early 2000s. Each of these developments potentiated a way to reveal ordinary cases of trauma across time and space, allowing
As if We Never Parted to downsize, privatize, and visceralize the nation from
a grand and abstract entity controlled by political ideology to the capillary experience of those who saw themselves as sharing the same national misfortune.
The contingent ensemble of favourable factors that led to the birth and
success of As if We Never Parted is evident in the very figure of Thu Uyên,
the founder and key producer. In Vietnam, Thu Uyên was one of the very
few media practitioners who had the motivation, skills, and influence to
­actualize a reality project such as As if We Never Parted, where one sees a
thorough blending of local contexts and new televisual techniques. Born in
1963, Thu Uyên herself went through the Second Indochina War and the
period of a socialist subsidiary economy in the 1980s; thus she well understands how the nation was devastated by warfare and poverty. Thu Uyên
spent many years doing her undergraduate degree in the Soviet Union during the 1980s, and then a long period working as a well-respected television journalist at VTV. It was through her previous connection with the
socialist bloc that Thu Uyên knew the famous Russian reality show Wait for
Me, which later became the model upon which As if We Never Parted was
based. But Thu Uyên only started As if We Never Parted in 2007, decades
after her first engagement with Wait for Me, and years into her successful
journalistic career. The reason was that in 2007 Thu Uyên had just finished
her journalism degree in the United States. Upon her return home, As if
We Never Parted was initiated out of her old inspiration from Wait for Me
and her new skills and motivation acquired in America. In 2007, Thu Uyên
could also outsource a part of her production work to her external partners
thanks to the state’s approval of the so-called socialization (xã hội hoá) or
privatization of media production. This was of crucial importance because
Thu Uyên was granted much more freedom in hiring and managing her own
search team that was not directly involved with VTV. While the broadcasting of As if We Never Parted is still controlled by VTV, the complex networks
of workers and search techniques extended much beyond the bureaucratic
mechanism set by in-house production.
Collective wound, private healing 109
So from a technical perspective, As if We Never Parted only became a
feasible project thanks to a combination of various factors: The popularity
of reality television, the burgeoning of the Internet, the rare professional
biography of Thu Uyên, and the privatization of television production. The
coming together of these factors in 2007 demonstrates how the new network of power relations enabled by As if We Never Parted was far from autonomic, instead, was deeply involved with the contingent assemblage of
available techniques, human capacities, and economic rationality in a particular timeframe.
Regarding the ‘how’ of reality television, many authors use the term ‘experiment’ to emphasize the creativity and adaptability of reality ­television
as a neoliberal technology of cultural government (e.g. see Palmer 2002;
Bratich 2006; Volcic & Andrejevic 2009). As Bratich (2006, p. 65) asserts,
reality television should be analyzed not only as a television genre but as
‘a loose assemblage of techniques and experiments’ that continuously
stretches the limit of its intervention into the formation of subjectivities.
Volcic and Andrejevic (2009) also argue that reality television works as ‘a
pseudo-social-scientific experimentalism’ that abstracts away political context in pursuit of improved individual behaviour. In what follows, I focus on
three successful affective ‘experiments’ in As if We Never Parted as a reality
project: First, the combination of multiple media platforms to collect and
connect ordinary traumas into an extensive archive of intimate stories of
victimhood; second, the excessive manifestation of intimate memories that
adds traumatic substance to the national timeline; and third, the use of observational travelogues in enabling a traumatic cartography of the nation.
The first televisual innovation is the way As if We Never Parted successfully invites a large number of ordinary people to voice out their private
tragedies at their own convenience and in their own terms. The clever combination of multiple media outlets, including televisual announcements,
hotline station, web page, PO box, and a nationwide network of technical
helpers has activated a kind of affective participation from below, which
permits possibly more Vietnamese people than ever before to reveal their
suffering, to make their sentiments known, and to connect with other sufferers on public media. Among all these technical factors, the Internet plays
an essential role besides the official television show because the online platform allows families with missing people to make their stories available to
everyone else. The Internet also enables the public to search for information, to review all shows, and to post feedback easily. The 70,000 search
requests collected over ten years, each promising a traumatic story told by a
real victim, provide As if We Never Parted with an extensive archive of personal trauma. This archive signifies a deeper and wider coverage of grassroots tragedies that have long been silenced by the structural exclusion. This
new coverage is precisely where the media have allowed power to reach what
Foucault (2003e, p. 27) terms ‘the point where it becomes capillary’. The vast
collection of traumas is vital to the success of the searching and reuniting
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process, which continues to enrich the existing archive with new surprises,
connections, and outcomes. The archive thus plays a central role in turning
As if We Never Parted into a ‘reality’ project by enabling real-life reunions
of hundreds of families, positively altering the lives of thousands of people.
The voicing of latent traumas across time and space also demonstrates the
capacity of As if We Never Parted to enable a kind of democracy from below, but mainly in terms of emotions. Such a democracy of feelings is one of
the most important achievements that As if We Never Parted contributes in
altering the politics of trauma in Vietnam.
The second experiment in As if We Never Parted deals with the generation
of affective encounters that entwine the traumatic history of the nation with
the visceral responses of viewers. The producers deliberately select, match,
and blend intimate memories from their extensive archive of traumas in a
way that explicitly illustrates the national timeline, turning these memories into the lived substance of national victimhood. The producers also
heighten the affective capacity of these memories by skilfully mixing closeups of tears and facial expressions with sentimental testimonies, gloomy
music, and nostalgic images. The manifestations of memorial intimacy and
bodily language activate the contagious nature of affect because, as Gibbs
(2001, para. 1) argues, ‘bodies can catch feelings as easily as catch fire’. This
contagious mechanism instantly prompts visceral connections between the
televised victims and viewers, spreading the feeling of homesickness, the
pain of separation, the hope of reunion, and the weariness of a ‘ruined country’ among these strangers. These affective encounters tie these subjects into
their emotional solidarity even before their cognitive mind can react.
One among many examples of the experiment with traumatic temporality
in As if We Never Parted is a televisual announcement that presents a portrait of an old woman with the following memorial narrative over gloomy
music (Như chưa hề có cuộc chia ly số 48 2011, emphasis added):
This is Mrs Đỗ Thị Vông, who went missing from her family during the
great famine in the 1940s. In those years, she lived in a poor village,
near a huge dyke, within a mat-knitting neighbourhood. If you were going from her home toward the dyke, you would see a small creek where
she used to catch shrimps. Mrs Vông still remembered, though vaguely,
that her original name was Tam, and her father’s name was Từ. She also
recalled that one time when she was walking with her mother to the
market to sell mats, she saw along her way plenty of beggars and starved
bodies. The famine eventually affected her family too. She was sent to
various places to beg for food and got lost. Her adoptive mother told
her that she was picked up in a pavement in the province of Nam Định.
This announcement introduces the case of a woman who does not know
her hometown; she even fails to confirm her original name or her exact age.
But she is sure about two things: First, her tragic participation in the great
Collective wound, private healing 111
famine occurring in many Northern provinces of Vietnam in 1944–1945
and, second, her desire to come back ‘home’. The famine is a nationally
acknowledged event, thus adding a known anchor to her obscure biography, and inviting public empathy for her desire to return home. As such, the
nation is already embedded in her intimate identification, for the sake of life
organization and emotional relevance.
In the public discourses about Vietnamese history, such as those found
in textbooks or in the media, this tragic famine is said to have claimed the
lives of around two million people. This number, however, mainly serves as
an evidence of the cruelty of Japanese and French imperialism, not an index to the traumas of the victims. The starving people and their devastated
families consequently have no faces, voices, or stories. They are just a lifeless number representing colonial inhumanity. In contrast to the nameless
victims of the famine in previous discourses of national history, the story of
Mrs Vông puts a real face on the tragedy, and fills this empty national event
with the pain of lived victimhood. Once screened on television, Mrs Vông’s
intimate testimony exerts a much stronger affective power than a mere
search clue because her story has allowed the forgotten famine to be viscerally appropriated in the present time without the need of actual ­w itnesses.
As Kuhn (2002, p. 127) argues, viewers of visual media can bodily ‘recognize’ the past much predating their birth as if they have always known such
past for real, thanks to the similarity created by the atmospheric effect of
sounds, images, and narratives. A touch of nostalgia enabled by an intimate
scene on the screen can transport us right back to some past that appears
so familiar, even when such a past has no direct connection to our own
personal life.
Mrs Vông’s haunting walk to the market with her mother in the 1940s can
generate a flashback to our own experience walking with our own mother.
Her dreamy time catching shrimp can nostalgically return us to our own
childhood activities. Her desperate longing to know her family and her
homeland is something we can immediately absorb because we all embrace
the fantasy of motherhood and communal kinship. The intimate memory
of Mrs Vông invites us to put ourselves back into her miserable situation,
less because we had witnessed the famine in actuality than because we can
directly feel her pain by reflecting back upon our own pain. When we are
touched by Mrs Vông’s memory, we cast ourselves as belonging to the same
national time with her, in an intimate way, much like the feeling of ­sharing a
family history with our parents and our grandparents. Berlant (2008, p. 63)
terms this affect-laden process ‘autoarchiving’, which explains the way
strangers connect their personal situations with the melodramatic sensations publicly distributed by the media. This autoarchiving process allows
As if We Never Parted to internalize the 1945 famine and many other historical tragedies into the ways viewers historically identify themselves.
The third experiment is the way As if We Never Parted allows viewers to
move across the national space through the lens of trauma. The traumatic
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map of the nation is created by the skilful employment of travelogues that
are filmed along the search journeys. Travelogue, as Berlant (2011, p. 60) argues, is a powerful technology of affect because this genre allows viewers to
embody the spatial dimension of daily life through the constant movements
of the camera. So, if the intimate testimonies in As if We Never Parted invite
viewers to viscerally enter the historical field of nationality without actual
witness, then the travelogues affectively lead viewers across the national
space without physical travelling.
Consider, for example, the strange story of Thắng, a missing teenager who
could not hear or speak (Như chưa hề có cuộc chia ly số 13 2008). The search
for Thắng’s home provoked a strong affective impulse and many tears because Thắng was not only a child but also a disabled, destitute, and missing
person. He lacked all the basic qualities of a ‘normal life’: Communicative
competency, a known identity, some savings, and, most importantly, a safe
home. The suffering of a child, as Ahmed (2004, p. 192) argues, can reconcile
our differences and bind us together in the name of universal love for all
children and the intimate love for each child of our own. Thắng’s failure to
communicate verbally actually intensified the show’s affective capacity due
to his increasing dependence on bodily expressions, which again triggered
the ­contagious mechanism of affective encounters, or what Ahmed (2004,
pp. 89–92) terms the ‘stickiness’ of emotion. Thắng’s facial movements, such
as his crying eyes, twisted muscles, and stuttering lips, were constantly amplified by televisual close-ups, which unsettled viewers’ world of homely security and joined them together into a community of compassionate rescuers.
Thắng’s story of missing and his bodily agony were embedded in three
travelogues, which were juxtaposed with live interviews and the final
­reunion in the studio. His journey of returning home traversed almost the
whole nation: South to North, mountain to plateau, urban to rural. The
travelogues presented the physical map of the country as uncannily blended
with the memorial maps drawn by Thắng himself as his main way of communication. When the camera was zooming in on his sketches, viewers saw
Thắng’s childlike depictions of his village with mountains, pagodas, rice
fields, bamboo fences, huge monuments, and plenty of giant electricity
­pylons. Thắng marked his personal map with the names of familiar places,
such as his school, the nearby temple, and crossroads. He also surrounded
these places with the beloved names of his siblings, neighbours, and friends.
But because all these names were wrongly spelt due to Thắng’s lack of verbal
capacity, his drawings actually provided more confusion than clarification.
Thắng’s doodles, like riddles and puzzles in the fantasy world of children,
served less as a useful search clue than an emotional index of his intimate attachment to his lost home. The travelogues with these drawings thus worked
as a vehicle of affect, adding more emotional intensity to Thắng’s bodily
expressions, promoting the feeling of nostalgia to that kind of Vietnamese
hometown commonly constructed by Vietnamese fairy tales, with bamboo,
rice fields, pagodas, mountains, and communal kinship.
Collective wound, private healing 113
The entanglement of geography and intimacy allowed the travelogues to
add spatial specificity to the universal fantasies of childhood and homesickness, anchoring these idealized norms to the tragic life of a Vietnamese child
in the Vietnamese land. The localities covered in the travelogues were no
longer mere destinations on the national map, but emotional places thickened by the shared desire to find a home for this unfortunate boy. When
viewers were led by the camera to follow the homeless steps of Thắng, they
simultaneously inhabited the Vietnamese homeland not only as an official
territory ‘out there’, but also as a ‘here’ and ‘now’ space of inner feelings
imprinted with the real suffering of the miserable child and his desperate
yearning for a loving home.
Thắng’s trajectory is one among numerous journeys of homelessness in As
if We Never Parted, which synergize into what Berlant (2011, p. 60) terms a
‘pathocartography’ of the nation that emerges from below and from within
viewers’ subjectivities. This affective cartography is embedded in the space
of daily survival and invested with the intimate desire for what is collectively
seen as worthy of yearning, typically the ideal of a warm home, protected
childhood, unconditional parenthood, and benevolent kinship. When viewers are moved across the national territory tracing the paths of the homeless, affect has brought into presence not only viewers’ trembling bodies but
also their shared space of belonging. In this way, viewers’ affect has made
their bodies a part of the national sphere of trauma and compassion. So if
Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 256) announce that ‘affects are becomings’
in the sense that our bodies and selves are constantly changing with affects,
then such becomings are inseparable from belonging. With affect, we become as we belong.
I have analyzed three major instances in which As if We Never Parted promotes the visceral relationship between television, the body, and the nation.
The first is the formation of an archive of ordinary traumas; the second is a
skilful amplification of intimate memories that allows viewers to viscerally
embody the national history; and the third is the use of the travelogues to
turn the official map of the nation into an emotional cartography of victimhood. All of these ‘experiments’ demonstrate how the production of trauma
in As if We Never Parted is conditioned more by biopower than juridical
sovereignty, in which, to use Foucault’s words, ‘the body is the inscribed
surface of events’ (2003c, p. 356). At the practical level, the mobilization of
viewers’ affect can effectively raise public appropriation of collective traumas and rescue real victims of politics without being cast as perilous in the
cautious eyes of the party state. At the governmental level, As if We Never
Parted indicates a more inclusive, and thus more productive, modality of
national government in which the intervention into viewers’ affective registers happens without provoking excessive political conflict. This biopolitical
practice thus reduces the political cost while increasing the depth of cultural
government in the formation of national subjectivities. Such work of biopower indicates that the norms of nationhood are not weakened on contact
114 Collective wound, private healing
with new media genres, but are actually intensified because these new media
technologies provide new possibilities for a more dispersed and naturalized
idea of shared nationhood.
Neoliberal remedy upon socialist pain
The revelation of trauma in As if We Never Parted enables the prospect of
healing because a remedy can only be given upon an acknowledged wound.
But because As if We Never Parted only fleshes out traumas by using a privatizing strategy, the possibility of healing inevitably remains a private
achievement. The healing effect is thus capacitated by the same neoliberal
logics that condition the making of trauma: Privatization, depoliticization,
and responsibilization. Healing, in this case, is the neoliberal remedy for the
ordinary wounds neglected by socialism.
So, similar to Contemporaries, neoliberal logics continues to serve as a
timely solution to the impasses of late-socialist politics. In Contemporaries,
the logic of self-entrepreneurship is promoted as an urgent exit from the
economic failure of the centralized system, while in As if We Never Parted,
the individualization of missing and reunion cases has emancipated muted
sufferings across time and space, rescuing real victims and thus soothing the
latent pain left behind after decades of accumulated violence. In both cases,
the implicit disappointment about collective politics has led to an explicit
hope of individual activism, either through entrepreneurial endeavour as
in Contemporaries or philanthropic aspiration as in As if We Never Parted.
In other words, when socialist collectivism has consistently failed the national citizens in all matters of money and security, private agencies have
obtained new rhetorical force in promising a better future of prosperity and
well-being. The neoliberal consolation to socialist pain, however, conceals
the continuity, if not the expansion, of systemic violence and inequality under the new forces of capitalist privatization. In all cases of reunion, public
mourning ends at the televised spectacle of the missing people reinstated
into ‘normal’ life, regardless of whether this much-anticipated ‘happy ending’ actually means any significant change in the social and political status
of the victims. The replacement of systemic justice with sentimental assuage
is thus the most prominent effect of this reality show.
The practice of intimate healing in As if We Never Parted correlates with
Berlant’s insight about the privatization and sentimentalization of public
debates in the United States after the Cold War. The main difference is that,
in the United States, the privatization of trauma and healing is a response to
the wearing out of the collective good, whereas in Vietnam neoliberal transformations are directed against the failure of state socialism. As ­Berlant
(1997, pp. 1–10) argues, starting in the 1990s, the media in the United States
increasingly transformed the national public from a political sphere into an
intimate public. This new logic reduces the nation to a space of private linkage among citizens, who feel belonging to their nation not in their political
Collective wound, private healing 115
affinity but in a shared feeling of vulnerability and in their shared aspiration
for a better life. The shift to intimate victimhood, while allowing subaltern
pain to be acknowledged, risks a reactionary tendency when many aspects
of social and political oppression are doomed to be a matter of personal
experience, and thus can only be solved at the private level. As Berlant and
Warner (1998, p. 553) argue, the neoliberal sphere of intimacy is ‘a promised
haven that distracts citizens from the unequal conditions of their political
and economic lives, consoles them for the damaged humanity of mass society’. The fetishization of intimacy thus appears as liberating the feeling
subjects from the wrongness of politics, but it actually reinforces the process by which the zone of privacy is further politically manipulated. While
serving as a kind of therapeutic healing, the national sphere of intimacy
increasingly exposes the private world of national citizens to the process of
neoliberal normalization and exploitation.
Berlant (2011, p. 19) also emphasizes that neoliberal intimacy ushers in the
return of conservative capitalist conventions, which are idealized into the
general promise of ‘the normal life’ or ‘the good life’. Being ‘normal’ or being
‘good’ in this case indicates a group of private and sentimental aspirations
at the core of capitalist individualism: The pursuit of a safe shelter (home),
a stable income (job), a good partner (love), and some recognition (identity).
When politics is no longer trusted, the intimate dream of the ‘good life’ stands
out as the most viable escape from the intense and pervasive state of precarity. The fantasy of the ‘good life’ helps maintain some organization and worthiness in the citizens’ perpetual struggles in surviving their actual life. This
kind of intimate ideal works circularly: It serves as a kind of painkiller that
allows the neoliberal subjects to cope with their vulnerable realities, but only
to attach them even more deeply to the fantasy of capitalist goodness, which
has always been a forever-elusive promise. The irony beneath the flourishing
of neoliberal intimacy is that the injuries caused by capitalist exploitation
actually intensifies the desire for the capitalist dream of ‘the good life’, thus
further alienating the feeling subjects from the actual cause of their suffering.
Berlant’s argument about the sentimental therapy of the ‘good life’ is extremely helpful to think with when one examines the politics of healing in
As if We Never Parted. The key fantasy underlying As if We Never Parted is
the intimate desire for a ‘home’, meaning a place of unconditional love and
protection. All sorts of ordinary traumas, regardless of previous political
tragedies or contemporary social problems, are instantly repaired by one
magic formula: Returning home. The ‘home’ in this case is less an actual
place of economic and social duty than a paradise of love and security that
can guarantee the victims safety, dignity, and direction out of their miserable life. This homely fantasy comes in a set of various related norms,
typically the sentimental ideals of parenthood, motherhood, childhood, and
communal kinship. With feelings being a key target of cultural government,
these purified concepts of love suddenly return as a serious therapy to heal
the immanent pain of the ‘ruined country’.
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In the case of Thắng, what actually moves viewers to tears is less the critical awareness of social and familial neglect than the sentimental engagement with the idealized image of an innocent and powerless child who does
not have homely protection. In crying for his particular misery, viewers are
driven away from the structural root of his homelessness to affectionately
engage in the task of instant rescuing. The ethical guilt of viewers is released
when Thắng is finally returned home, where, in viewers’ fantasy, he would
be loved and protected by his parents, siblings, and neighbours.
Still, in the case of Thắng and in a majority of other missing instances
presented by this reality show, the home and the homeland had actually
failed to offer the victims a ‘normal life’. Thắng got lost so easily and suffered so much precisely because of familial and social irresponsibility: His
family was too poor, his parents and siblings were too busy to look after
him, there was absolutely no technological or financial support for his
­disability, and he had no social protection when economically exploited and
physically ­bullied during his four years living as a missing person. His prolonged homelessness was not a matter of personal ‘bad luck’ but of systemic
­inequality in the lives of the poor, the weak, and the disabled.
In many ‘realities’ shown by As if We Never Parted, the home in its actual
form has hosted so much complaint, burden, dissension, conflict, and abuse
that many children, if not directly ignored or abandoned by their own parents, choose to leave home and thus become missing children. Many mothers, wives, and daughters have no choice except to live on the street or in
charity houses because of the brutality in their own home, by their own
men. Similarly, in the name of the homeland, many families were violently
torn apart by wars and political oppression. A majority of the missing people in Vietnam are poor, weak, voiceless, socially neglected, and politically
abused, unless and until their stories get onto television to confirm what it
means to have a ‘true home’ and to belong to a ‘motherland’. The affective
impression created by the spectacle of nearly 800 successful reunions has
kindled so much hope and trust in love, while revealing very little about
the structural cause of the 70,000 unfound cases. Our emotions in this case,
as Ahmed (2004, p. 12) puts it in another context when she reviews recent
theories on affect and emotion, ‘can attach us to the very condition of our
subordination’. In the case of As if We Never Parted, the sensations of justice
have made viewers and participants feel as if they are truly heard, valued,
and consoled. The bare realities of exploitation, in capitalism or socialism
alike, thus become more tolerable, if not worth enduring. This pain killing
process again reinforces the belief in the neoliberal therapy of the ‘good life’,
even when such goodness is always a half-truth.
Back to the case of Thắng, As if We Never Parted finally enabled his ‘happy
ending’ when the search team found his home by screening all possible locations. In follow-up footage broadcast a few months after the tearful reunion,
Thắng was shown returning to Ho Chi Minh City to resume his work as a
servant at the same food store where he worked 16 hours a day from 3 pm
Collective wound, private healing 117
to 7 am. He had been given a small raise from his formerly extremely low
salary because his appearance on television turned out to be free advertisement for the food shop. Still, his living conditions were basically unchanged
after the reunion: The same (bad) job in a strange city, far away from home,
without any social protection for his disability. But at least his life was more
‘normal’ now, when he could feel assured that someone else still recognized
and cared for him at home, even when this home had always failed to afford him an actual ‘good life’. His ongoing condition of exploitation suddenly became less painful with a home waiting for him to come back. For
Thắng and many of us, the ideal of a home, more than ever, stands as an
essential ­condition of security, recognition, and dignity amidst the inflation of ­political and social uncertainties. In a mixture of despair and hope,
the citizens of the ‘­r uined country’ need to hold onto the promise of the
home and the homeland as places of intimate belonging where one can be
­economically poor and ­politically weak, but at least being rich and strong
‘at heart’.
Reconciliation ‘at heart’: Love heals us all
From Latin roots, reconciliation means ‘bringing together again’. The reunion of family members in As if We Never Parted is explicit demonstrations
of reconcilability, when the torn-apart families are once again repaired with
the return of missing members. But the reconciling effect of As if We Never
Parted is not restricted to the scenes of familial and personal dramas because in connecting Vietnamese people across political differences As if We
Never Parted aims to synergize personal healing into the reconciliation for
the ‘ruined’ country rent asunder by prolonged historical hatred.
The question of national reconciliation in Vietnam is most deeply involved with the legacy of the Second Indochina War. Around this deepseated division between Northern and Southern visions of Vietnam, As if
We Never Parted has ‘brought together again’ a large number of stories told
by people coming from both sides of the battlefield, demonstrating how at
the personal level, the devastating cost of warfare was actually shared by
both the winners and the losers. With the nation reduced to a matter of
private pain, As if We Never Parted binds opposite parties into an intimate
sphere of political vulnerability, whereby former enemies suddenly realize
that they are more alike than hostile.
In August 2008, As if We Never Parted reunited a former Viet Cong nurse
with her daughter after nearly 40 years of separation (Như chưa hề có cuộc
chia ly số 9 2008). In 1971, the nurse, Mrs Ngọc, was treating her communist
patients at a jungle clinic in the central province of Pleiku, when her threeyear-old child was violently taken hostage by Southern Army raiders. A few
days after the kidnap, the Southern raiders demanded Mrs Ngọc’s surrender
in a blackmail letter with a newly taken photo of the baby girl, which later
became the only clue left behind about her. After more than three decades
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Collective wound, private healing
of failed searching, Mrs Ngọc was among the first to submit a search request
to As if We Never Parted in 2007. On the day Mrs Ngọc appeared on television to tell her own story, her missing daughter happened to be a viewer and
recognized herself in the photo on the small screen. The daughter made the
phone call to the hotline number, and then was returned to her parents in an
extremely touching reunion.
In official discourse, a heroic mother–fighter like Mrs Ngọc would represent the silent but noble ‘sacrifice’ of the winning side, when the mother
placed her patriotic duty above her personal happiness (she never surrendered to the blackmail from the Southern Army anyway). This narrative of
socialist heroism, however, is barely mentioned in As if We Never Parted.
Instead, the show explained in personal terms how the tragic experience of
losing one’s own child was incommensurable with the collective victory of
communism. Mrs Ngọc is portrayed as a miserable victim of war instead
of a proud winner, although these two images are not necessarily contradictory. Decades after the war, and despite many certificates of merit awarded
to her family by the party state, this mother never returned to her ‘normal’
life. As Mrs Ngọc told viewers, she missed her daughter every single day of
her life, and the guilt of failing to protect the vulnerable child from warfare
tormented her body during her sleepless nights and hopeless days. In her
own words, ‘everyone in this wide world with a kind heart will instantly feel
my pain’. Her pain cannot be read against the political division between
winning and losing; it can only be felt through the common experience of
unconditional parenthood.
The agony of Mrs Ngọc profoundly resembles that of another parent,
Mr Việt, a Southerner refugee whose newborn son was kidnapped in 1981
(Như chưa hề có cuộc chia ly số 56 2012). A few years after the fall of
­Saigon, Mr Việt risked the lives of his whole family on a small boat across
the ocean to escape the communist regime newly settled in the South. The
family survived the rough sea to make their way to the United States,
but the youngest son, three months old, was taken away by Thai pirates
during the trip. In 2012, Mr Việt came back from California to seek help
from As if We Never Parted. Thanks to the networking effort of the show,
he finally found his son, now a 30-year-old man who grew up in a coastal
village of Thailand. On 17 July 2012, Mr Việt appeared on As if We Never
Parted to share his peculiar journey of fatherhood, which had affectively
joined numerous people across three countries in the search for his muchloved son.
In 1981, Mr Việt left Vietnam because the party state imposed post-war
discrimination against previous supporters of the collapsed regime. In
seeking a better life outside communist rule, thousands of Vietnamese boat
people died on the ocean and many of the survivors lost family members
(Cargill & Huynh 2000). But until recently, the pain of boat people was completely erased from public discourse in mainland Vietnam, creating latent
and unspeakable trauma. As Borneman (2003, p. 208) writes,
Collective wound, private healing 119
Any attempt by Southerners to seek redress for injury is understood by
the Party not as a demand for justice but merely as a bid for more political power. The Party prohibits media coverage (and hence public discussion) of certain issues and historical injuries, a tactic that may transform
aspects of the past into ‘public secrets’, but does not make them go away.
Failing to achieve any form of publicity, stories about the suffering of boat
people ‘operate like unsubstantiated but irrepressible rumor, continuously
dissimulating reality and therefore never able to reach the status of either
truth or lie’ (Borneman 2003, p. 208). Mr Việt was one among very few witnesses, if any, who had appeared at length on Vietnamese national television
to provide personal testimony about the tragic journey of a Vietnamese political refugee. Although he only spoke in non-political terms, his televised
story of death and life on the ocean publicly acknowledged the status of
‘truth’ of the suffering of rejected citizens. By reducing a political catastrophe into intimate stories of familial loss, As if We Never Parted successfully
brought a silenced political tragedy onto television, and engaged the public
with another aspect of the traumatic past of the nation, regardless whether
such a past belonged to the winning or losing side.
The story of Mr Việt, a boat refugee, and that of Mrs Ngọc, a Viet Cong
fighter, would be completely incompatible in political terms because their
political biographies have cast them enemies. Still, the victory on the Viet
Cong side in 1975 did not bring back to Mrs Ngọc her missing daughter, and
her pain was never soothed by this collective victory. In the same vein, the
political bitterness of an emigrant Southerner did not prevent Mr Việt from
showing up in the television studio owned by his previous enemy to seek
public help. Although Mrs Ngọc and Mr Việt diverged in their political affiliation, these two as parents touched us in the exact same way on As if We
Never Parted, when their parenthood shone through the prolonged suffering
caused by the political vicissitudes of the nation.
The private sphere of familial love is where the prospect of national reconciliation becomes possible in As if We Never Parted. The reconciling logic
goes like this: Even if people fail to agree in political terms, they can be
sympathetic to each other when it comes to their attachment to their home
and their beloved ones. As if We Never Parted thus brings together people
from opposite political worlds and harmonizes their hostility by emphasizing the shared condition of political victimhood, and then equalizing them
in the private dream of familial unity. Instead of re-examining the failure of
old politics, As if We Never Parted transcends previous hatred by relocating
the national subjects in an idealized space of emotional compatibility where
hostility automatically ceases to exist.
In compensating political wounds by intimate healing, As if We Never
Parted has publicly revalued many other silenced tragedies of Southerners
besides the stories of boat people. These tragedies include the missing cases
related to the Baby Lift Program that evacuated thousands of Vietnamese
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children to the United States after 1975, the stories of children lost during
the chaotic flight of Southern civilians before the fall of Saigon, and the
situation of many mixed-blood children abandoned by their Vietnamese
mothers when their American fathers left the country after the war. These
politically driven tragedies had almost no public visibility in Vietnamese
media until appearing in As if We Never Parted with real names, real traumas, and an intense sense of affective and ethical urgency.
The link between the family and the nation as seen in As if We Never Parted
is not a new nationalist strategy in Vietnam because the ideal of the ‘revolutionary family’ (gia đình cách mạng) has always been an important means for
socialist politics to promote patriotism. The sanctified biography of Ho Chi
Minh as the ‘old father of the nation’ (người cha già dân tộc) was massively
­imposed even before Hồ’s death. The promotion of ‘heroic Vietnamese mother’
(mẹ Việt Nam anh hùng) has been a prolonged practice of state-run commemoration since the Reform (Ho Tai). But these ideals of symbolic parenthood
imply the extension of the family into the nation or the nationalization of
the family through public duties. The socialist family is only recognized and
valued once submitted to the public good of the revolutionary cause. This
explains why the socialist system has long used ‘family categories’ (thành phần
gia đình) to discriminate between revolutionary and non-­revolutionary people in order to refuse the latter political, social, educational, and economic
privileges (Vo 2011, p. 200). In the socialist world, the family became a sphere
of political division between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ socialist subjects.
On the contrary, the family in As if We Never Parted appears as an ­intimate
domain beyond, if not against, the outer world of political obligation. The
nation is now familialized rather than the other way around because national
problems are reduced to a matter of personal transformation within the private home. What the national subjects share is their aspiration to maintain
the well-being of their own selves, and their own families, before such self-­
development ‘naturally’ leads to the betterment of the whole country. The
family sphere is thus no longer judged by political differences, but rather by
sentimental attachment to the universal norms of love and blood relationships.
Reconciliation, as Thu Uyên (personal communication, 9 March 2014)
stressed, is one of the key purposes of As if We Never Parted since its inception. Thu Uyên is highly aware that her show addresses a lasting taboo in
Vietnamese public discourses because her team deliberately includes those
with a ‘politically sensitive’ biography in their unification project. ­Southern
soldiers, boat people, and those from the re-education camp regularly appeared in As if We Never Parted, and their pain is treated equally to that
of a ‘normal’ citizen. As if We Never Parted cleverly survives the censorship system because this programme never explicitly deals with politics.
Instead, it fetishizes the wound. As if We Never Parted joins what Ahmed
and Stacey (2001, p. 1) call a ‘testimonial culture’ that has pervaded global
discourses since the late twentieth century, in which ‘accounts of traumas of
exceptional violence and of historical injustice proliferate alongside stories
Collective wound, private healing 121
of everyday discrimination or misdemeanor’. But when pain becomes a
common ground upon which people are valued and connected, there is a
great danger of flattening all sorts of pain into the pain defined by those
that have more access to the public domain. In addressing the latent pain of
­Vietnam, As if We Never Parted equalizes different experiences of pain into
the generic and unchallenged domain of national pain, acknowledging the
violent past without questioning its uneven continuity and distribution in
the present bodies. When ‘their’ loss is treated as ‘our’ loss, ‘they’ become
a part of ‘us’ but not the other way around. When additional recognition is
given upon otherwise forgotten pain, the ‘we’ of the Vietnamese nation is a
bit enlarged, but the nation remains the same old one. So the case of Mr Việt
might hint to a prospect of healing from the point of view of Thu Uyên and
her mainland colleagues, but might remain purely a matter of private family
business from the view of Mr Việt and his diasporic fellows. Reconciliation,
in this sense, eases the guilt of the winner without providing the same sense
of collective justice to the side of the loser.
To sum up, the case of As if We Never Parted confirms an insightful argument by Kraidy (2010) that the transcultural and affective nature of reality
television can serve as a powerful catalyst to stir up contentious forces in
local politics, allowing new stories to be told and latent conflicts to be unveiled. By thoroughly embedding the global genre of reality television in the
Vietnamese cultural settings, As if We Never Parted has successfully fulfilled the progressive potential of television in attending to weak voices from
below and promoting the (impossible) act of reconciliation. As elaborated
earlier, the global genre of reality television does not work as an automatic
technology of neoliberalism but is blended with local forces in a contingent
manner. In the context of late socialism when political ­c ensorship remains
strict, a programme that acknowledges the recent past of political tragedies
like As if We Never Parted is rare and worth celebrating. This achievement
demonstrates the effort of Vietnamese television producers in using new
­ roblems of
media technologies to respond to pressing social and political p
the nation. But again, our affective optimism is often ‘cruel’, to put it in
­Berlant’s terms (2011, p. 1) because the promise of private happiness is forever elusive. Past sufferings are only healed in As if We Never Parted through
an affective investment in the painkilling fantasy of ‘a good life’. But when
the promise of love works as a strategy to empower individuals against disappointing politics, it simultaneously distracts them from the ­systemic roots
of violence. The cost of socialist failure in Vietnam might be less about the
resistance to old political norms than about the popular enthusiasm for
­neoliberal therapy in the name of the loving self.
Conclusion
Fraternity without uniformity
The more open the game, the more appealing and fascinating it becomes.
Michel Foucault 2003a
Beginning with the case of The Rich Also Cry and ending with the reality
show As if We Never Parted (where almost everyone cries), this book demonstrates how popular television contributes to the resilience of Vietnamese
nationalist practices in the era of marketization and globalization. In hopes
or tears, the nation persists. Serving as an important point of reference for
Vietnamese viewers to make sense of their past and to imagine a shared
future, the idea of shared nationhood continues to show us its profound
life-organizing quality in a post-war society.
My recognition of the resilience of Vietnamese nationalism does not assume some inevitable consistency between the past and the present; instead,
I argue that the continuity of nationalism is actualized through significant
mutations of previous patterns defined by warfare and state socialism. Popular television, understood as a set of cultural practices that mainly developed after the Reform, has served as an enabling site for my inquiry into the
question of nationhood. I aim less at providing a generalizing account or an
overarching prediction on post-Reform national formation than at revealing how the national game, to borrow Foucault’s term, is becoming more
appealing and fascinating, partly thanks to popular television ­(Foucault
2003a, p. 41). Far from being the owl of Minerva vanishing at dusk, as
Hobsbawm (1992b, p. 192) once predicted, ­nationalism, albeit transfigured,
remains pertinent to the governing of various aspects of everyday living in
contemporary Vietnam.
The distinctiveness of the case studies in the previous chapters depicts
the multiplicity and contingency involved in the relationship between television and the nation, while their similarities have allowed me to identify a broader picture of national formation in the post-Reform times. In
what follows, I focus on the resonance among the case studies to identify
prominent trajectories of national formation enabled by post-Reform
television.
Fraternity without uniformity
123
Wider and deeper: Going banal and intimate
This book locates the nation and the media in the ordinary landscape of
everyday politics, demonstrating my resistance to the reductionist idea of
Vietnamese media as a mere mouthpiece of the party state. My focus has
been on the various ways in which television has unsettled and resettled
ordinary life, engendering alternative forms of national membership that
complicated, and in many ways departed from, the existing legacy of socialist nationalism.
There are three prominent tendencies that shape the relationship between
popular television and post-Reform nationalism. The most immanent one
(to the extent that it appears almost invisible and insignificant) is the domestication of nationalist practices, when the idea of the nation is built into
ordinary ways of living centred on the space of a home. This process was
enabled by the rapid availability of TV sets in Vietnamese households after
the Reform, and the popularity of many television programmes with key
themes of family concerns. The new practice of watching television at home
allowed Vietnamese citizens to enjoy popular entertainment simultaneously
with many national fellows. In this way, television turned the domestic space
into a vital location that perpetuated the ‘imagined community’ of nationhood. The domestication of national formation is best demonstrated by the
success of soap operas in Vietnam in the early 1990s, which started a homely
and national ritual when the dramas were watched privately by an extensive
number of Vietnamese people. When national formation and banal dwelling
became indivisible, everyday life was touched by a much more tender but
ubiquitous form of governmental power.
The second change in national formation enabled by television was the
individualizing force that outweighed the previous collectivizing force of
state socialism. When the home was open to the governmental work of post-­
Reform television, every individual was given an opportunity to be an agent
of cultural government. New television genres arriving in the late 1990s and
early 2000s invited a much greater number of ordinary individuals than before to publicly raise their voices and to tell their personal stories on the
small screen. The talk show Contemporaries is an exemplary case of this individualizing tendency, in which the personal is directly connected with the
national in the celebration of self-entrepreneurship. Thanks to the arrival
of ordinary television, national subjects are increasingly governed in their
individuality instead of as a homogenized member of the socialist mass.
The third tendency that shaped the relationship between popular television
and nationalism was that national belonging increasingly became associated
with the corporeal realm of emotion and affect. As demonstrated by the reality show As if We Never Parted, new televisual experiments could deliver
a visceral sense of national attachment, inviting intimate stories of political
victimhood and unveiling the intimate zone of pain, trauma, and compassion. The body thus became a new working site of post-Reform nationalism.
124
Fraternity without uniformity
These tendencies are closely interdependent, with one being the condition or the intensified version of the others. In saying that these tendencies
are distinctively post-Reform, I do not mean that the process of national
formation in the pre-Reform era lacked the domestic, personal, and intimate dimensions. What is ‘new’ here is that the arrival and pervasiveness of
popular television since the Reform have turned multiple layers of ordinary
life into important domains of power where various governing strategies
are performed with much wider and deeper effects than before. Nationalist
practices are open to more alternatives, and the field of national formation
is no longer only subject to the rule of socialist authoritarianism.
One positive implication of the wider and deeper penetration of nationalism into everyday life is that national formation in Vietnam is now becoming plural and inclusive. More voices are heard and more potential for
civic engagement is explored. Television facilitates a participatory ­culture
that leads to a better environment for grass-roots democratization. At
the core of this participatory turn are the new possibilities of bottom-up
­resistance and empowerment, a prospect particularly desirable in the context of late-socialist politics with a long history of repression. Television
dramas in the early 1990s, for instance, introduced a new sense of pleasure
to post-Reform living and allowed ordinary subjects to create their own
repertoire of meanings without having to worry about political restrictions. Strategies of self-empowerment have also been creatively performed
in Contemporaries and As if We Never Parted, when Vietnamese people
are invited to express their personal aspirations and to heal their silenced
pain caused by political violence and social injustice. In a country where
victims of wars, poverty, and social violence are still found almost everywhere, the work of popular television in Vietnam has persuasively demonstrated the potential of the media to release anxiety and enhance the hope
for a brighter future.
Bottom-up democratization, however, is a specific effect rather than the
underlying logic that shapes the interaction between popular television
and nationalism. The discourse of self-expression and self-empowerment
found in post-Reform television is first and foremost a practice of cultural
government that suits the demands of an increasingly marketized society.
The liberation of ordinary voices from below might enable more possibilities for a better democratic media environment but might also multiply
active pursuers of private wealth and security without necessarily offering
the much-needed care of collective justice. The fact that nationalist practices became widely and deeply associated with the ordinary domain thus
simultaneously demonstrates the extended coverage of neoliberal culture
in Vietnam through popular media. Nationalism combined with capitalist
fantasies is the post-Reform formula that replaced the previous model of
socialist nationalism.
Nationalist practices consequently perform their own forms of exclusion following the logics of capitalism. When people are expected to
Fraternity without uniformity
125
care for their own lives by making their own choices, individual citizens are made responsible for coping with multiple collective problems
determined by structural inequality. Problems of the outer world are
internalized into personal matters, as if they can be solved simply by
self-created solutions. Structural roots of social inequality are overlooked in the celebration of whoever survives capitalist exploitation
through individualist endeavour. The language of capitalist competition
is now applied to cultural activities in the name of the self, and the self
is, in turn, ethically justified by the promise of nationalist contribution.
In Contemporaries and As if We Never Parted, the illusory equality of
hope, love, and self-confidence serves as self-soothing escapes from the
unchallenged reality of social injustice. In an effort to improve their own
lives, individuals are increasingly alienated from the larger picture of
their exploited condition that has been intensified by post-Reform marketization. Whereas the previous model of socialist nationalism marginalized those who failed to exhibit their ideological submission to the
party state, post-Reform popular nationalism exploits its subject in the
name of the subject herself.
The transition from socialist to market-based nationalism did not alarm
the censorship system because the censors understood ordinary spheres
such as popular television as being outside politics; hence they identified
no overt tension between new nationalist practices and state-imposed ideology. Without explicit conflict with the late-socialist regime, the combination of nationalism and neoliberal capitalism appears less a project of
ideological Reform than a technological evolution. New nationalist practices mainly recycled old norms already embraced by socialist nationalism.
What is changed is that post-Reform nationalism is effectively channelled
through new routes, gently flowing into micro spaces of social relations,
and flexibly adapting to individual variations as much as collective demands. The power grid of nationalism becomes more dispersed, covering
much finer aspects of daily life than in the era of socialist politics. Nationalism could then produce greater human resources to meet the demands of
capitalist development.
Certainly national formation in the post-Reform era is far from being
outside of politics, although it increasingly presents itself as such. On the
contrary, the politics of the nation has become effectively naturalized as
part of cultural banality, consequently appearing much less visible than in
the previous era of socialist orthodoxy. As Turner (2016, p. 25) argues about
the recent emergence of commercial nationalism around the globe, contemporary nationalist discourse only presents itself as being ‘post-political’ because it already ‘exploits the political to a significant effect’. In the case of
Vietnam, the process of national formation probes more intimately into the
space of everyday life, and nationalism is no longer constrained by its former function as a top-down instrument of the ruling elite; it becomes more
immanent, more ‘natural’, and thus more inescapable.
126
Fraternity without uniformity
Between the global and the national
When ideological boundaries suddenly become redundant in the post-Cold
War world of ‘free trade’, Vietnamese popular television becomes a dynamic
site where the national and the global are highly interconnected. Although,
politically, Vietnamese media are often criticized for failing to engage in international standards of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’, such a political failure
does not prevent the global language of neoliberal culture from entering
Vietnam via popular media that embrace an apolitical impulse. The globalized prospects of economic engagement and free cultural activities are
particularly welcomed in Vietnam because people are so frustrated with the
political shame originating from the spectre of socialist oppression. For better or worse, global capitalism is precisely the horizon of Vietnamese banal
nationalism.
The nationalist practices discussed in the previous chapters are all more
or less imprinted by global trends, although they are experienced as deeply
national. Appadurai (1996, p. 3) argues that globalization is significantly
facilitated by the rapid expansion of electronic media. The burgeoning
of television that began right at the opening of the Vietnamese economy
to the world is itself an inherent part of this globalizing process. The way
­Vietnamese television participates in globalization, however, is first and
foremost shaped by the rare context of Vietnam as a post-war, post-Reform,
and late-socialist country. As I have discussed, many post-Reform genres
and programmes reflect global trends only after they are refracted through
Vietnamese producers’ distinctive connection with the socialist and post-­
socialist countries. National distinction also prompts Vietnamese producers
to fill the genres and programmes inspired by global trends with a wide
range of content that is thoroughly immersed in the local idea of nationhood. The global thus mainly affects Vietnamese television after travelling
through the national filter.
Another prominent global tendency is the way television manifests an
increasing sense of political mistrust combined with an escalated feeling
of insecurity. In the cases of Contemporaries and As if We Never Parted,
the weariness of socialist leadership and the worries about a belated and
a ‘ruined’ country appeared unique to Vietnam. But this national particularity actually matches the atmosphere of crisis in many other contexts,
including those without a history of socialism. Elsewhere in the Western
world, the feeling of crisis is augmented by the retreat of the welfare state
and by the threat of terrorism, economic collapse, political migration,
­climate change, and so on (Rose 1996; Brown 2003; Puar 2007; Lazzarato
2009; ­Swyngedouw 2010). In Vietnam, the main source of anxiety comes
from the enduring shadow of socialist oppression and the haunting idea
of Third World poverty and backwardness in a highly marketized world.
­Without much faith on political collectivism, Vietnamese television producers turn to the neoliberal language of privatization and individualization
Fraternity without uniformity
127
as an alternative solution to social precarity. The widespread sense of insecurity is thus a global epidemic, but it is not homogeneous because it always
grounded in national and local scenes. The example of popular television
in Vietnam demonstrates how the so-called globalization is not necessarily
making an explicitly global appearance, but is more often performed with
a nationalist twist. So, following the suggestion of Appadurai (1996, p. 158),
we should indeed ‘think ourselves beyond the nation’ in order to trace the
transnational mobility of capital, technologies, social relations, cultural values, and ideologies. But we also need to recognize that the nation is itself an
important component of the global assemblage. Globalization might significantly destabilize the idea of the nation, but it is far from marking the death
of nationalism.
Sovereignty and governmentality: Between resistance and
complicity
I resist simplified assumptions about the Vietnamese state’s repression of
the media and nationalist discourses. Again, as emphasized throughout this
book, to question such a stereotype is not to deny the power of ‘the state’,
but rather to abandon the perception of power as a static and innate property of some institutional or individual actor, whether such an actor belongs to ‘the state’ or ‘the media’. These entities, if they are to be named as
important actors in the process of national formation at all, only maintain
their status as such in a perpetual process of solidification, reinvention, and
disruption. Each of my case studies shows how ‘the state’ and ‘the media’ are
neither fixed nor singular, but constantly reproduced and altered through
practical labour whereby they are both agents and effects of power. There
is no such thing as the state that exists prior and outside a concrete network
of power. Instead, a specific enactment of state power always takes part in
a larger ensemble of media representations, old and new technologies, human resources, and governing rationalities. In a similar manner, the media
in Vietnam could only develop into ever-more complex systems of cultural
production by relying on various ensembles of political legacies, juridical
frameworks, existing cultural norms, and novel elements engendered by
marketization and globalization. Understanding the relationship between
the state and the media is less about assuming that one actor has power over
the other than it is about demonstrating how these actors are constantly
made and remade by inscribing each other, enabling new potentials for
power reinforcement as well as disruption. The articulation between the media, the state, and the nation is thus best investigated by empirical attention
to the specificity and contingency of power relations instead of by relying on
a stereotypical assumption of automatic authoritarianism.
At the heart of my inquiry is the negotiation between existing forms of
socialist sovereignty in the pre-Reform era and the arrival of new forms
of governmental power influenced by the opening of the market and the
128
Fraternity without uniformity
globalizing effects of the post-Cold War environment. My previous chapters provided multiple examples of how the relationship between sovereignty
and governmentality contains both elements of resistance and complicity,
and, overall, manifests a state of compatibility rather than disagreement.
On the one hand, sovereign power does not shrink at the multiplicity of new
governmental practices. On the other hand, these sovereign measures are
mainly based on the old practices of socialist surveillance, juridical punishment, and case-by-case censorship. These measures are designed to police
explicit political content, like news, current affairs, or dissident discourses,
while being relatively insensitive to the ostensibly apolitical realm of popular media practices that have flourished in Vietnam since the Reform.
Such insensitivity means that the continuity of political centralization
might protect the state from explicit oppositional politics, but it can also
become a blinker that prevents the state from adapting to the ever-more
diverse and capillary forms of media power. Top-down censorship consequently does not exhaust the potential for Vietnamese media to tell new
stories, engender new forms of cultural identities, and address social and
cultural issues in ways that reach beyond the state’s direct manipulation.
Conversely, governmental practices enabled by the media mainly compete
with the state outside existing political boundaries set by sovereign measures. In so doing, these new practices significantly lessen the monopolistic
position of state sovereignty without reforming it.
Elements of implicit resistance to state sovereignty are found in all my
case studies. A common pattern is that nationalist discourses in popular
television often recount the distressing past of socialism to legitimate a
new sense of national connectedness in the present. The most evident example is the case of the drama Hanoian, in which the nostalgic feelings
­towards the utopian virtues of the socialist past are used to augment a
bitter sense of dissatisfaction about the present. The image of socialist
ideology ­i mprinted by false promises in the past and moral corruption
in the present serves as the basis for what I term ‘anti-state nationalist’
sentiments, in which national fraternity is grounded in a shared sense of
defiance instead of complacency with the state. This kind of anti-state discourse, however, mainly operates as a way of releasing daily anxiety about
the uncertainty of post-Reform economic developments, a sort of cultural
and political i­ ntimacy shared among local subjects, and thus does not
cross the boundary imposed by institutional censorship. A similar form
of everyday resistance is found in the reality show As if We Never Parted,
where the desire to reveal muted tragedies of the nation is expressed
through a privatized discourse about trauma and healing. Again, national
unity is promoted through shared tragic feelings about the past, and is
fuelled by an ambition to move beyond the old mistakes of socialist politics. In all cases, nationalism remains an important grid of intelligibility
and emotionality to bind ordinary people together in their disappointment
with various aspects of state power.
Fraternity without uniformity
129
Everyday resistance to the spectre of the socialist regime simultaneously engages with the new present of capitalist transformation. An
act of resistance does not work purely for the sake of resisting per se:
It ­a lways presupposes a new subject position as part of a new network
of power relations. My case studies demonstrate various ways in which
the devaluation of socialist prestige is coupled with the valuation of capitalist endeavours. The failure of socialism is a collective alibi for the
approval of capitalist escalation.
Many popular television shows diverge from the political project of the
state, but in so doing actually converge with a new dimension of the state’s
governing trajectory: Its economic ambition. This paradox manifests
the very odd nature of the so-called ‘market socialism’ in post-­Reform
­Vietnam. The implicit resistance to the state’s sovereign rule does not
prevent popular television from selectively making use of various capitalist strategies that are well tolerated, if not promoted, by the state. For
example, in The City Stories, the producers completely disregard the recent past of socialist heroism to promote a kind of nostalgia that targets
a new past based on ‘traditional’ values. This new past coincides with the
systemic promotion of ‘cultural identity’ after the Reform, the emergence
of the tourist industry, and the dynamic engagement of Vietnam in the
global politics of heritage; all of these activities are more or less facilitated by state power. In the case of Contemporaries, socialist hardship is
recalled only to authorize the neo­l iberal discourse of entrepreneurship,
which conveniently translates the state’s collectivist slogan of ‘rich people, strong nation’ into the neoliberal fantasy of self-investment. In As if
We Never Parted, new experiments with televisual genres and techniques
foster the voluntary participation of ordinary victims to liberate traumatic feelings. As if We Never Parted thus enables a kind of individualist hope that prevents the subjects from engaging in further political
questioning about the persistence of inequality and the continuity of past
violence upon certain groups of people. So, if the refusal of collectivist
socialism signifies a critical response to the spectre of the state, then such
refusal simultaneously naturalizes the new logics of capitalist privatization, which well aligns, deliberately or not, with the state’s new economic
and cultural legitimacy.
The ambivalent relationship between sovereignty and governmentality
is most pronounced in the persistence of nationalism itself. The idea of
the nation suits the sovereign goal of state politics as much as it suits the
capillary expansion of neoliberal governmentality into the sphere of banal
living. On the one hand, nationalism is where one can observe most clearly
the top-down practices of the party state, in which socialist prestige is justified in the sanctified name of the motherland. Radically promoted by the
socialist regime during warfare and state-building, nationalism continues
to be a vital means of maintaining the legitimacy of the Vietnamese party
state in the post-Reform era. On the other hand, when popular television
130 Fraternity without uniformity
embroiders nationalism into the fabric of everyday life as a detour from
the state’s centralized power, it naturalizes the idea of nationhood at the
deeper layer of ordinary living, and thus inherits and intensifies the same
sovereign goals as the party state. Even when the role of the party state
is no longer privileged, the desire for sovereign glory in the name of the
nation persists. In other words, nationalist practices increasingly rely on
diffuse forms of governmental power beyond the state’s direct control,
but the ultimate goal of nationalism remains indivisible from the desire
of sovereignty. The recent nationalist outbreak regarding the territorial
conflict in the South China Sea is a telling example of how the seduction
of sovereignty is neither declining nor necessarily linked to conservative
forms of socialist state power (online bloggers actually condemned the
party state for not being nationalist and sovereign enough in handling
the Paracel and Spratly islands). Sovereignty in the name of the socialist
state might be considered bad, but sovereignty in the name of the nation
remains indisputably prestigious and supreme in contemporary Vietnam.
Here it is important to re-emphasize Billig’s insight (1995, p. 7) about the
immanent quest for sovereignty embedded in even the most banal forms
of nationalism:
It would be wrong to assume that ‘banal nationalism’ is ‘benign’ because
it seems to possess a reassuring normality, or because it appears to lack
the violent passions of the extreme right … Banal nationalism can hardly
be innocent: it is reproducing institutions which possess vast armament.
The governmentalization of nationalism, even when appearing non-­
sovereign and politically benign, does not hint at a decline of sovereign violence. Nationalism once served as the most important ideological basis for
­legitimating the sovereign power of state socialism in Vietnam. But, unfortunately, the departure from socialist politics does not indicate any critical
re-examination of the concept of the nation. The sovereign appeal of nationalism remains strong in the new era of neoliberal marketization as much
as it used to be under orthodox socialism. Sovereign desire in the name of
the nation, with or without the name of the state, continues to shadow the
way individuals conduct their own lives in their banal living as much as in
radical moments of political crisis.
In this book, I challenge the overstatement of socialist sovereignty in
­understanding the dynamics of Vietnamese media. But I also resist a way of
reading Foucault that grants too much independence and autonomy to governmentality, thus neglecting the questions of specificity and contingency
that are at the core of all Foucault’s work. In the case of Vietnam, state sovereignty does not cover the whole field of power, but governmentality is not
inevitable either. Governmental practice is neither easy nor clean, nor does it
always succeed. The key conclusion is thus less about how governmentality
Fraternity without uniformity
131
‘replaces’ sovereignty in regulating national subjects than it is about how
popular television permits a much more complicated environment for the
interweaving of multiple networks of power relation in the name of the nation, in which the boundaries between commercial entertainment and public duties, political resistance and capitalist accumulation, and liberation
and oppression are increasingly permeable.
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Index
The Abandoned Field: Free Fire Zone
(Cánh Đồng Hoang, Vietnamese
movie) 31, 37
Abu-Lughod, L. 35, 36, 39
advertisement 14, 15, 16, 17, 62–3,
73–4, 100
affect: body and 101, 105, 112;
contagious nature of 110–2; culture
government and 106; nation and 102;
see also As if We Never Parted
Agamben, G. 45
Ahmed, S. 112, 115, 120–1
Anderson, B. 2, 3, 38
Andrejevic, M. 66, 67
Ang, I. 29–30, 39, 101
Appadurai, A. 44, 126, 127
The Apprentice (American reality show)
76–7
Aronczyk, M. 84
As if We Never Parted (Như Chưa
Hề Có Cuộc Chia Ly, Vietnamese
reality show) 19, 29, 98–121, 122,
123–4, 125; affective experiments
in 106–14; autoarchiving 111;
biopower 105–6, 113; format of
100; geography and intimacy 113;
healing 114–6, 119–20; national
belonging, emotion, affect and
123–4; national and personal, tragic
connections between 102, 106–7;
national victimhood 110–4; neoliberal
remedy 114–7; Nguyễn Phạm Thu
Uyên, founder and key producer of
29, 100, 107–9, 120; public status
of trauma 103–5; reconciliation
117–21; technical condition of 108–9;
travelogue 111–3
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
(ABC) 14
authenticity 52–3, 55
autoarchiving 111
banal nationalism 6, 130
Banet-Weiser, S. 93
Basu, L. 45
Berlant, L. 85, 111–2, 113, 114–5, 121
Warner, M. 115
Billig, M. 3, 6, 130
biopower 19, 98, 103, 105, 106, 113–4
Bloomberg 15
Bonner, F. 11, 18, 57, 58, 60, 61, 66
bottom-up resistance 35–6, 124
Boym, S. 28, 43, 44, 55
Bratich, J.Z. 109
Breuilly, J. 3
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)
14, 15–6
Brown, M.E. 30, 34, 39
Brown, W. 126
Brunsdon, C. 29
Bùi Thu Thủy, (Vietnamese television
producer) 73–5; see also Stay at Home
on Sunday
cable television 15, 16
Canada Broadcasting Corporation
(CBC) 14
Cartoon Network 15
case studies, selection of 10–2
censorship: evasion of 74, 84–5, 106,
120, 125; cable television and 15–6;
political trauma and 103–4; popular
entertainment and 31; self-censorship
14, 84; state-centric view of 7–8, 64;
structure of 13–4
Central Propaganda and Education
Commission (Ban Tuyên Giáo Trung
Ương) 13
146
Index
Chakrabarty, D. 92
Chatterjee, P. 3
China 3, 14, 22, 28, 43, 52; commercial
nationalism in 86; neoliberalism in 96
Chu Lai (Vietnamese writer) 46
Cinemax 15
The City Stories (Chuyện Phố Phường,
Vietnamese television drama) 10, 11,
18, 42, 46, 129; new oldness and 51–6;
plot of 49–50
CNN International 15–6
Cold War, legacy of 29
commercialization 14, 65
commercial nationalism 86, 92, 96,
106, 125
commercial sponsorship 14–5,
73–4, 100
community formation 84–5, 90–1, 106
Communist Party 103, 119; I am the
seedling of the Party (children’s song)
32–3
competition 10, 12, 15, 28, 88, 92–4,
100, 125
Contemporaries (Người Đương Thời,
Vietnamese talk show) 18–9, 29,
78–97, 123, 124, 125; commercial
nationalism 86, 92; context of 79–80;
disadvantaged conditions, problem
of 89; Đặng Lê Nguyên Vũ 78, 87–9,
92–3, 94–5; global competition 92–4;
global mobility 92–3; guest selection
80–3; inward logic, commercial
nationalism 86–91; national and
global, entanglement of 95; national
and personal, entanglement of
83–4; neoliberalism, selective logics
of 86; outward logic, commercial
nationalism 91–7; political
engagement, evasion of 84–5; selfempowering narratives and 80, 82,
83, 85, 87, 91; socialist heroes 81–2;
Tạ Bich Loan, host and founder 79;
Vietnamese dream 92
Cosmopolitan magazine 64
cultural government: Foucault’s concept
of 9; television dramas as 36–41,
45, 56
cultural nationalism 52
Culture and Arts on Sunday (Văn Nghệ
Chủ Nhật, Vietnamese television
program) 27–8, 34, 60
‘cultured family’ campaign 70, 71–3,
75, 76
Dallas (American television drama)
30, 40
Ðặng Lê Nguyên Vũ 78, 87–9, 92–3,
94–5
de Certeau, M. 29, 30, 34
Deleuze, G. 39, 40, 45, 113
democracy 81, 83, 110, 124, 126
democratainment 66–7
Department of Radio, Television, and
Electronic Information (Cục Phát
Thanh, Truyền Hình và Thông Tin
Điện Tử) 13, 15
Ðỗ Thanh Hải, Vietnamese television
drama director 25–6, 27, 37
Dramas on Friday Evening (Phim Truyện
Tối Thứ Sáu, Vietnamese television
program) 30, 40
Drummond, L. 35, 63
Earl, C. 63–4, 66, 71
Eastern Europe 24, 28, 29, 32, 43,
46–7, 50
Edkins, J. 102–3
Emotions (Korean television drama) 26
empowerment: cultural studies of 67–8;
self-empowering narratives 73, 80, 83,
85, 87, 91, 124; sex as, discourses of 65
entrepreneurship 52, 78, 80, 86, 94, 114,
123, 129
ethics: differentiation from morality
68–9; ethical language of ordinary
television 73–4; neo-traditional ethics
51–2
everyday life: everyday normalcy, return
of 25; Foucault’s perspective on power
in 36–7; ordinary television and 59,
67, 70; television drama and 37–9
everyday nationhood 2–6, 10–1
Facebook 13, 96
The Falling Season (Mùa Lá Rụng,
Vietnamese television drama) 42
famine 110–1
fandom 28, 35, 40
Felski, R. 37
Forbes magazine 78, 95
Foucault, M. 76, 122, 130; biopower,
concept of 19, 113–4; capillary power
109–10; ethics, differentiation from
morality 68–9; everyday life, power
and 36–7, 38; governmentality,
television and 39; hupomnēmata,
self-caring function of 44–5; power,
Index
productive nature of 9; sovereign
power 104–5
Fox Sports 15
franchised programme 6, 16, 62, 100
Game of Thrones (American television
drama) 16
game show viii 2, 14, 15, 17, 3, 61, 62,
70, 79; see also SV’96; Stay at Home
on Sunday
Gandhi, L. 95
gender stereotypes 64–5
Gellner, E. 2–3
geography and intimacy 113
Gibbs, A. 110
Gillen, J. 4
Glamour magazine 64
global competition 92–4
global mobility 92–3
globalization 2, 10, 18, 29, 52, 57, 78,
94–5, 122, 126–7
Google 96
Goscha, C.E. 3
Hanoian (Người Hà Nội, Vietnamese
television drama) 10, 11, 18, 42, 50,
51, 55–6; bitter nostalgia and 47–9;
plot of 46
Harms, E. 35–6
Hartley, J. 66, 67
Hawkins, G. 69
Hayton, B. 7
HBO 15
healing 114–6, 119–20
Heng, R.H.K. 7
Hien, N. 63
Ho Chi Minh 32, 48, 120
Ho Chi Minh City Television (HTV) 22
Hobsbawm, E.J. 2–3, 6, 44, 122
Holland, P. 60
Hutchinson, J. 2
Huỳnh Văn Tiểng (Vietnamese media
practitioner) 22
imagined community 38, 123
inequality 48, 78, 88–9, 114, 116,
125, 129
Internet, in Vietnam 17, 108, 109–10
Internet Protocol TV 15
Journey to the West (Chinese television
drama) 26
juxtapolitics 85
147
Kania-Lundholm, M. 86
Kassandra (Venezuelan telenovela) 28
Kelley, L.C. 3
Kraidy, M. 121
Kraidy, M. and Sender, K. 66
Kuhn, A. 8, 111
Lại Văn Sâm (Vietnamese television
producer) 60–1
Lê Bình (Vietnamese television
producer) 14–5
Lê Duẩn 103
Leshkowich, A.M. 52, 71, 72
lifestyle media 65–6
Little House on the Prairie (American
television drama) 26
Livingstone, S.M. and Lunt, P. 66
Tạ Bích Loan (Vietnamese television
producer) 29, 79–80, 84, 84, 89
Logan, W. 53
Long, H. 26, 53
Mã Diệu Cương (Vietnamese television
producer) 21–2
McAllister, P. and Luckman, T.C.T. 57
McHale, S.F. 5
McKinley, C. 7
MacLean, K. 8–9, 72, 90, 96
Malarney, S.K. 51, 52, 103
marketization, television and 14–6,
60–3, 108
Marr, D. 27, 87
Martin-Barbero, J. 3
Master Chef (franchised reality
show) 62
media in Vietnam ix–x 15, 22;
broadcasting management 13–4;
popular nationalist sentiments and
6; press freedom, discourses of 7–8;
socialization of 16, 108; the state
and 8, 63–6, 75–6, 96, 127–8; see also
censorship; television industry
Meeker, L. 53
memory viii 2, 18, 54, 55, 89–90, 111;
technology of the self and 44–5;
Vietnamese television and 61, 22–4,
32–4
memory dispositif: Basu’s notion of 18,
45–6; The City Stories and 49–56;
Hanoian and 46–9
MTV 15
My Fair Princess (Chinese television
drama) 38
148 Index
Nairn, T. 3
nation: idea of Vietnam as 1–2; Renan’s
perspective on 2, 25, 102
national branding 93
national and global, entanglement of
91–5, 126–7
national and personal, entanglement of
19, 55, 56, 78–80, 83, 89–91, 102, 103,
106–7, 112, 123
national belatedness 95
national belonging, emotion, affect and
123–4
national tradition 3, 18, 43, 48, 51–4, 129
national victimhood 110–1
nationalism: banal nationalism
6, 130; everyday life and 6, 11;
governmentalization of 130;
individualization and 90; marketbased nationalism, transition to 125;
sovereignty and 130–1; studies of 2–3;
Vietnamese nationalism, studies of 3–4
neighbourhood viewing 24
neoliberalism: neoliberal remedy 114–7;
selective logics of 86; socialist politics
and 95–7; technology of 121
news 2, 7, 10, 11, 14, 16–7, 59, 60,
69, 128
Nguyễn Huy Thiệp 49
Nguyễn Khải Hưng (Vietnamese
television drama director) 34, 46
Nguyễn Phạm Thu Uyên (Vietnamese
television producer) 29, 99, 100,
107–9, 120, 121
NHK World 15
Nielsen Company 17
Nora, P. 51
Northern television, establishment and
early years of 21–4
nostalgia 31, 111, 112, 128, 129; Boym’s
analysis of 55; Hanoian and 46–9;
memorial form of belonging and
43–4; perceptions of space and time
44; post-and late-communist contexts
43; reflective nostalgia 55; restorative
nostalgia 55; Second Indochina War
and 48–9; socialist nostalgia 81, 82;
technology of the self and 45; socialist
historiography and 48; socialist
wartime 47–8; television dramas and
42–3; veterans and 49
Ong, A. 52, 95
Ong, A. and Zhang, L. 96
Oppo (Chinese smartphone brand) 14
ordinary television: amateur participation
58; Bonner’s notion of 57–9;
conversational style 58; critical studies
of 66–8; emergence and development
of 18, 57–77; ethical language of
ordinary television 73–4; everyday
rhythm and 57; franchised formats 62
Oshin (Japanese television drama) 26, 38
Ouellette, L. and Hay, J. 65, 66
pathocartography 113
Palmer, G. 66, 109
participation 66–9, 71–2, 82, 109,
110–1, 129
The Path of Life (Đường Đời,
Vietnamese television drama) 42
pay television 15–6
Pelley, P.M. 3, 48
The People Around Me (Những Người
Sống Bên Tôi, Vietnamese television
drama) 42
Pettus, A. 63
Phạm Thanh Phong (Vietnamese
television drama director) 52, 53, 54
politicization 4, 7
press freedom 7–8
The Price is Right (franchised game
show) 62
rating 15, 17, 23
reality television 101, 106, 108, 109, 121;
see also As if We Never Parted
reconciliation 1, 19, 46, 98, 117–21
Renan, E. 2, 25, 102
Reporter Without Borders 7
The Retired General (Tướng Về Hưu,
Vietnamese short story) 49
Return to Eden (Australia television
drama) 26
The Rich Also Cry (Mexican telenovela)
32, 33, 37–8, 42, 60, 122; new everyday
and 24–9
Road to Mount Olympus (Đường Lên
Đỉnh Olympia, Vietnamese television
quiz show) 70
Rofel, L. 55
Rose, N. 41, 75, 85, 90, 126
Rose, N. and Miller, P. 65
Russia 28, 31, 32, 79, 100, 108
Sài Gòn Giài Phóng newspaper 38, 40
Said, E. 52
Saigon, fall of (1975) 1, 21, 22, 81, 98,
102, 118, 120
Index
Salemink, O. 52, 53
Sassen, S. 95
The Saving (Của Để Dành, Vietnamese
television drama) 42
Schwenkel, C. and Leshkowich,
A.M. 96
Second Indochina War: As if We Never
Parted and 98, 99, 102; Hanoian and
46, 47, 48, 49; idea of Vietnam and
1–2; socialist film during and after
31; television during 20–2; trauma in
103, 104
Seigworth, G.J. and Gregg, M. 106
self-formation: nostalgia and 44–5;
ordinary television and 66–68;
television drama and 39–41
self-help 74–6, 83
self-Orientalism 52–3
Seven Shades of Rainbow (Bảy Sắc Cầu
Vồng, Vietnamese television game
show) 70
Shaq’s Big Challenge (American reality
show) 65
Simply Maria (Mexican telenovela) 26,
32–4, 38
Skeggs, B. 67
Skeggs, B. and Wood, H. 66
Smith, A. 2
socialist propaganda 13, 31, 32, 84, 103
socialist youth movements 59
South China Sea 6, 130
Southern Beauty (Người Đẹp Tây Đô,
Vietnamese television drama) 42
Southern broadcasting network 20–21;
technical legacy from 22–3
The Southern Land (Đất Phương Nam,
Vietnamese television drama) 42
sovereignty: governmentality and
127–31; sovereign power 104–5
Soviet Union 21, 28–9, 31, 43, 89, 108
Star World 15
state-centred approach 4, 7–8, 63–6,
76, 105
Stay at Home on Sunday (Ở Nhà Chủ
Nhật, Vietnamese television game
show) 70–71, 73–6
The Story of Mộc (Chuyện Nhà Mộc,
Vietnamese television drama) 42
subjectivity 45, 66; ordinary television
and 68–9
Surborg, B. 54
SV’ 96 (Vietnamese television game
show) 70; ordinary shows and
58–63
149
tactical resistance: As if We Never Parted
and 114; Contemporaries and 85;
de Certeau’s notion of 30, 34; Hanoian
and 48, 56; television dramas as 29–36
Taylor, P. 5, 31
television industry: advertisement and
14, 15, 16,17, 62–3; colour broadcasts
22; commercial sponsorship 14–5,
73, 100, 102; consumption patterns
17; Eastern Europe, connection with
29, 46,47, 50; foundations of VTV
(Vietnam Television) 21; nation
division and 20–1; national satellite
system 27; neighbourhood viewing 24;
overview of 12–7, pre-Reform history
20–4; pre-Reform programming 31;
Russia, connection with 31, 79, 100,
108; socialization of 16, 108; TV sets,
sources of 24, 27; see also ordinary
television
television dramas: early foreign dramas
in Vietnam 25–6, 32–4; fandom for
28, 35, 40; ordinary language and 33,
38–9; nostalgia and 42; self-reflection
of viewers 40; tactical resistance and
29–30; technology of the self and
39–41; technology of domination
and 39; Vietnamese dramas, early
production of 27–8, 34; see also
Hanoian; The City Stories
technology of the self 39–41, 44–5, 68
technology of domination 39, 40, 44,
68, 73
technology of affect 19, 98, 112
technology of government 36–7, 66,
95, 109
testimony 100, 110–1, 119, 120–1
therapeutic effect 85, 102, 106,
115–6, 121
Thomas, M. 37
Thomas, M. and Heng, R.H.K. 35
Tiền Phong newspaper 59
Tom and Jerry (American cartoon) 31
Trần Bình Minh (Vietnamese television
producer) 29
Trần Ðăng Tuấn (Vietnamese television
producer) 29, 62
Tranh Niên newspaper 38, 59
traumas: power and 102–3; public status
of 103–5; tragic structure of feeling
and 101; traumatic cartography 111–3;
traumatic temporality 101–11
travelogue 111–3
Tuổi Trẻ newspaper 38, 59, 62
150 Index
Turner, G. 11, 66, 67, 125
12A and 4H (12A và 4H, Vietnamese
television drama) 35
United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO) 53
The Unpaid Do-gooder (Người Vác Tù
Và Hàng Tổng, Vietnamese television
drama) 42
US-Vietnam diplomatic relations 1
veteran 1, 47, 49, 56, 81–2
Vietnam Amazing Race (franchised
reality show) 62
Vietnam Idol (franchised reality show)
6, 62, 100
Vietnam TV Audience Measurement
(TAM) 17, 23
Vietnamese dream 92
Vietnam’s Next Top Model (franchised
reality show) 62
Viettronics Thu Duc 27
Vo, N.M. 120
The Voice (franchised reality show) 62
Volcic, Z. and Andrejevic, M. 86, 109
VOV (Voice of Vietnam) 12–3
VTC (Vietnam Television Corporation)
12–3
VTV (Vietnam Television) 10–5, 21, 25,
27–9, 63, 108
VTV1 (Vietnamese television channel)
17, 60, 62, 78, 79, 98
VTV2 (Vietnamese television channel) 62
VTV3 (Vietnamese television channel)
16, 28–9, 59, 60–2, 70, 73, 75, 79
Well, Just You Wait (Russian cartoon) 31
Wheel of Fortune (franchised game
show) 62
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
(franchised game show) 62
viewer 17, 23, 25, 26, 28, 30, 33, 40
Williams, R. 37
World Press Freedom Index 7
Yang, F.I. 86
Yearnings (Chinese television drama) 26
Youtube 6, 13
Zha, J. 28
Zhu, Y. 43
Zhu, Y., Keane, M. and Bai, R. 28
Zinoman, P. 3, 31, 49, 84, 103