Crossing the Street in Hanoi

Carol Wilder

Description

This is a study of media and cultural artifacts that constitute the remembrance of a tragic war as reflected in the stories of eight people who lived it. Using memoir, history and criticism, Crossing the Street in Hanoi is based on scholarly research, teaching and writing as well as extensive personal journals, interviews and exclusive primary source material. Each chapter uses a human story to frame an exploration in media and cultural criticism. What weaves these different threads into a whole cloth are the stories of the Vietnam War and the long shadow it casts over American and Vietnamese cultures.

Foreword by William Logan  Introduction  Chapter 1: The War That Won’t Die  Chapter 2: Hoa Lo Prison Museum: 'The Fury Burning Within' Chapter 3: Bac Ho: 'Casting Pearls before Swine' Chapter 4: Life on Vietnam: 'A Glory Preserved in a Wilderness Valley' Chapter 5: Reading Graham Greene: A Promise to the Dead  Chapter 6: Vietnam Love Songs: 'Rode Hard and Put Away Wet' Chapter 7: Reinventing Rambo: Flooding with Love for the Kid  Chapter 8: Murder on May 4th: The Case of the Missing Mob  Chapter 9: Long Bien Story: Giving and Taking Away (with Douglas Jardine)  Afterword: A Note on Theory

Sujets

• Hanói
• Modern warfare
• Index of urban studies articles
• Vietnam
• Demonology
• Hanoi
• Region
• Vietnam War
• Satanism
• Viêt Nam
• Regional
• Religion
• Cultural Studies

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 06 janvier 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783201488
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2013 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2013 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Ellen Thomas
Cover photo: Carol Wilder
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Production manager: Tim Mitchell
Typesetting: Planman Technologies
Print ISBN 978-1-84150-735-4
ePUB ISBN 978-1-78320-148-8
ePDF ISBN 978-1-78320-149-5
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK
 
 
for Elissa and Casey my life teachers
 
 
“God save us always from the innocent and the good.”
Graham Greene
The Quiet American
Table of Contents
Foreword by William Logan
Introduction
Chapter 1: The War That Won’t Die
Chapter 2: Hoa Lo Prison Museum: “The Fury Burning Within”
Chapter 3: Bac Ho : “Casting Pearls before Swine”
Chapter 4: Life on Vietnam: “A Glory Preserved in a Wilderness Valley”
Chapter 5:Reading Graham Greene: A Promise to the Dead
Chapter 6: Vietnam Love Songs : “Rode Hard and Put Away Wet”
Chapter 7:Reinventing Rambo: Flooding with Love for the Kid
Chapter 8:Murder on May 4 th : The Case of the Missing Mob
Chapter 9: Long Bien Story : Giving and Taking Away (with Douglas Jardine)
Afterword: A Note on Theory
Acknowledgments
References
Index
Foreword
What a delight it is to read Carol Wilder’s perceptive book on Hanoi. It’s a city I know very well and recognize so clearly in Carol’s book, although she presents fresh and refreshing new perspectives. It was in January 1990 that I first visited Vietnam’s capital city, not many years before Carol’s first foray into Hanoi in 1993. I went there on a UNESCO mission to help local planners identify and protect the city’s built heritage before the American embargo on foreign aid and investment ended and development pressures would impact on the city’s historic precincts, streetscapes, and buildings. Little did I know then that Hanoi would be the focus of much of my heritage work as university scholar, educator, and consultant.
Back in January 1990, Hanoi was capital of a state that had been locked in civil war and foreign invasion for half a century and was still tied to the Soviet bloc politically and economically, though not culturally. There had been little building in the city during that time and the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century streetscapes were still mostly intact. It was a silent city, apart from the loudspeaker system that still woke the citizens each morning with rousing tunes. Hardly a motor vehicle was seen—only the occasional Russian-made jeep—and the French colonial tramway system was in a state of collapse. People moved around the city on foot or in swarms of bicycles.
I wish I had taken more photos of the city as it was then: hardly any shops or motor vehicles, no advertisements—a quiet city. But that city is long gone, transformed economically, socially, and physically in the most dramatic ways imaginable. The Sixth Congress of the Vietnam Communist Party in 1986 officially introduced a set of doi moi (renovation) policies that opened up Vietnam to the world. The American embargo ended in 1994 and Vietnam was admitted to ASEAN year the following year. Foreign investment was through joint ventures and focused on manufacturing, tourism, and urban development. High-rise office and apartment buildings now dominate much of the colonial French Quarter, but mercifully have mostly been kept out of the Ancient Quarter—the market town of shop-houses and narrow streets—or around Hoan Kiem, the little lake at the city’s heart.
While the traffic in those days was quiet, there were still some distinctive noises—pigs being herded through the Ancient Quarter to market in the middle of the night, the wake-up music broadcast across the city on the war-time PA system, and, of course, the fireworks at Tet. The foreigner from more sedate cities enjoyed the overload of sensory stimuli—and the constant bustle of people everywhere. In 1990 the intense overcrowding of Hanoi dwellings meant domestic life spread onto the footpaths—cooking, relaxing with friends, washing clothes and children. My own writing on Hanoi has largely focused on the built environment, although always with the aim of showing how architectural design and urban planning reflected the values of the state and its people. Carol Wilder brings in the people in a much more satisfactory way, delving into the attitudes of Hanoians and opening up new dimensions for teaching and learning about Hanoi and Vietnam.
By the late 1990s motorbikes started replacing bicycles; then came the fleets of taxis and installation of traffic lights. The footpaths have become motorbike parking lots, pedestrians are now forced to walk on the street itself, often weaving in and out of the traffic, and crossing streets is a nightmare. Carol Wilder has chosen one of those defining Hanoi experiences to represent the city’s and Vietnam’s rapid economic and social transformation. But it’s also an apt metaphor for the difficulties that outsiders—especially those coming from the “advanced West”—have in understanding what makes Vietnam tick. How are the country and its capital city run, who are the key players and where do the people fit in? What do Hanoians think about current political, social, and environmental issues impacting on their city and their lives?
The metaphor extends to the attempts by foreigners to understand their history, especially the place of the two wars of independence, the first against the French (1945–1954) and the second against the United States and its allies (1955–1972). It’s again like cutting through the traffic of vehicles coming from the left and right, with the aim of getting to the other side intact—with a coherent set of notions about how contemporary Vietnam was formed. In fact, many Vietnamese also have difficulties in understanding their country’s history. From the 1940s ideological pressures in the North put blinkers on the way the past could be understood, or at least discussed in public forums and taught in schools.
With regard to the war of independence, Vietnam is the exception to the rule that it is the victors who write the history. Much research and writing has been done by French and American scholars, some infused by Cold War attitudes but some remarkably independent. By contrast there has been little critical work published in Vietnam but a considerable output of state-sponsored books running the official line on Vietnam’s history. This will change as the ideology softens; but in the meantime we are left wondering how major events such as the Vietnam War persist in memory and popular culture.
This is where Carol Wilder’s book comes to the fore. Drawing on her background in communication and media studies, she probes into what the past means to the Vietnamese today, what is passed from one generation to the next and how, and what has been the role of the media in shaping consciousness of the war and its aftermath. She sees the Vietnam War as an “undead war” that simply refuses to lie down because it doesn’t fit with the American national narrative in which the United States is the good guy and the winner. By contrast, she finds that, in Vietnam, it is only one of many wars and relegated to the distant past by many, if not most young Vietnamese today.
In America, Vietnam is treated as a commodity in the popular culture of books, films, memorials, and tourism and that war is the dominant focus. She was surprised to find, therefore, that the Vietnam War was only a very minor feature in Hanoi’s Ho Chi Minh Museum. A visit to the Revolutionary Museum in the old colonial customs house would have given a different impression, as did, in fact, her visits to and research on the Hoa Lo Prison Museum. But the general point that she and others, including President Clinton, make is fundamental—that Vietnam is more than a war. In Vietnam, memories of the wars of independence survive among those who lived through them and who are now in old age, of course, but there has been a dimming of passions. The overseas Vietnamese—the Viet Kieu—are on the whole an exception: living in the United States, France, Australia, and Canada, they maintain their rage. Again, this will fade as the generations pass.
Carol Wilder’s book comprises a set of stories that tease out what the Vietnam War still means to a selection of Vietnamese and Americans who were touched by it. Her aim is to put a human face on what was an inhuman experience, and she succeeds wonderfully. The chapter on the Hoa Lo Prison Museum demonstrates Carol’s multidimensional technique. She describes the museum site as a microcosm of the contradictions and tensions in contemporary Vietnam between protecting war heritage and encouraging new development, and explores the personal memories of Nguyen Thi Phuc Hang, who was imprisoned there by the French because of her nationalist activities, counterpoised against those of John McCain, downed U.S. pilot and presidential candidate, who was jailed there by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
The book is thoroughly researched and draws on a wide variety of primary and secondary sources. Additionally, there is a fascinating autobiographical aspect in which Carol uses her own experiences from memorializing the Vietnam War and reading Graham Greene’s Quiet American to her year in Hanoi funded by a Fulbright award in 2007–2008. Her personal reflections and diary entries become an integral part of the exploration. Carol is to be congratulated for achieving such a fine balancing act, effectivel