Asian Studies Review

ISSN: 1035-7823 (Print) 1467-8403 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/casr20

Re‐orientations: East Asian popular cultures in

contemporary Vietnam

Mandy Thomas

To cite this article: Mandy Thomas (2002) Re‐orientations: East Asian popular cultures in
contemporary Vietnam, Asian Studies Review, 26:2, 189-204, DOI: 10.1080/10357820208713340

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10357820208713340

Published online: 27 Feb 2007.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 246

View related articles

Citing articles: 2 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=casr20
Asian Studies Review. ISSN 1035-7823
Volume 26 Number 2 June 2002

RE-ORIENTATIONS: EAST ASIAN

POPULAR CULTURES IN
CONTEMPORARY VIETNAM

MANDY THOMAS
University of Western Sydney

Hanoi, November 2001.

A group of young people are gathering excitedly outside the cinema. The
boys are wearing shiny sportsclothes and many have gelled hair. Several
of the girls are driving the latest Honda motorbikes. Some of these
teenagers have mobile phones. Some have bleached, spiked hair. This is
the "hip" crowd and they have come to see the latest Korean film. When
I ask one of them about why they like Korean films, he says, "It's the
Korean wave, its very cool at the moment".
Fieldnotes

The recent efflorescence of interest in Korean films and popstars in Vietnam is

a phenomenon that has been experienced all through Asia (Cho 2001), but in
Vietnam this interest is localised in particular ways that reveal the modalities
through which Vietnam positions itself in the region. Because Vietnam does not
have a highly developed entertainment industry, Vietnamese audiences are
hungry to consume the films, soap operas and songs that are produced elsewhere
in Asia. This paper discusses the part played by these cultural products from the
wealthy industrialised countries of Asia in articulating the discursive category of
"Asia" in Vietnam.1 It also examines the complex entanglements of Asian pop
culture and electronic media with the local Vietnamese discourses of an imag-
ined future that is necessarily subversive to the present regime. The wealthier
Asian countries that are referred to here are Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong
Kong, Singapore and Malaysia. These countries are the principal aid donors and
investors in Vietnam, and are therefore seen as more "developed" than Vietnam.
The article explores the way in which the popular cultural images of these
"wealthy" Asian countries contribute to the framing of a contemporary
Vietnamese national identity.

© Asian Studies Association of Australia 2002. Published by Blackwell Publishing Limited.

190 Mandy Thomas

In recent years, investment in Vietnam from Asian countries has far outweighed
that from the west, and Vietnamese people themselves often privately call this a
"recolonisation" by Asia. Regional investors are often involved in an orientalisa-
tion of Vietnam. This is indicated not just by the view of Vietnam as a cheap
labour force or of its untapped market and investment potential but by the dis-
course of underdevelopment and poverty in which Vietnam is always framed as
"backward". The apparently vast differential between the economic successes of
East Asia2 and its poor southeast Asian relative appears to illustrate East Asian
countries' assumption of their place in the sun of global modernity that is always
necessarily in contrast to the perceived pre-modern nature of most communist
societies. This paper argues that the images of East Asia in Vietnam are chroni-
cally ambivalent, and it is viewed with both allure and distaste. This ambivalence
relates to Vietnam's sense of belonging to an Asian community of nations and
cultures. While there is a deep affinity, there are also historical tensions and dif-
ferences between Vietnam and its neighbours. At the same time as the populace
is being exposed to the wealth and sophistication of the cultural productions of
East Asia and their attendant fantasies of accumulation, the Vietnamese state is
attempting to promote its view of what Vietnamese cultural life should be and
define its version of "inside" culture versus "outside" culture.
To begin, let us go back for a moment to 1975, when the roots of present atti-
tudes towards East Asian cultural products in Vietnam were planted. At this time
the socialist revolution in the north of the country reached the south with the
fall of Saigon. The north had been effectively cut off from consumer culture since
1954. In the south there was an extraordinary abundance of consumer goods—
Saigon was awash with Hitachi and Sanyo electric fans and Honda motorbikes.
Immediately, US, Japanese and Taiwanese products began flowing northwards
and the south became a highly sought after posting for northern soldiers and
bureaucrats alike. There are many reports of the way in which the southern con-
sumer culture shocked the northerners who had, until then, been convinced of
the value of their socialist ideology. The reaction of the regime was to start a
program of demonising these goods and to argue that being attached to mater-
ial wealth would lead to a personal lack of freedom and to the exploitation of
their people. East Asian technologies all came to be perceived as part of the evil
hand of the US puppets that threatened to erode nationalist sentiment and com-
mitment to the socialist revolution. The technologies and cultural life of the pre-
1975 period were banned. This did not stop the desire for these products,
however, and periodically there have been crackdowns on certain "foreign" cul-
tural products, most notably in 1996, as described later in this paper. Since the
fall of Saigon, East Asian exports have transformed from technologies to cultural
productions, from television sets to soap operas and films. This enculturing of
East Asian exports has placed them in an even more dangerous category to

© Asian Studies Association of Australia 2002.

 East Asian Popular Cultures in Contemporary Vietnam 191

Hanoi's cultural policing than straight consumer items ever were. It is this
awkward triadic relationship between East Asian cultural commerce, the plea-
sures and desires of a populace and the fears and controls of a regime that I
propose to unravel here.
In 1998 I visited Yen Bai province, a remote part of north Vietnam. In a little
village one night I went to a small cafe to get a meal. The moment I set foot in
the tiny bamboo-walled restaurant a karaoke machine was dragged in from
another room. With the hurried work of numerous men fiddling with dials and
electricity cords, the machine was soon set up before me and was blaring out over-
seas Vietnamese music. The images before my eyes were of exotic locales and
Asian bodies. The songs were remade in California from the pre-1975 period in
southern Vietnam. They were wistful, sad and deeply nostalgic for an earlier time
and another place. The contrast between the nostalgic music and the techno-
logical medium of the karaoke machine was striking. During the meal I noticed
that dozens of people had gathered outside the restaurant to stare in at the
machine. I asked them later what they thought of karaoke. The various descrip-
tions included "beautiful", "magnificent", and "wonderful". "Where does karaoke
come from," I asked? They all knew—-Japan. When I asked how they felt about
Japanese things, suddenly someone from the crowd became the spokesperson:
'Japan, Taiwan, South Korea—they are our models. We'll be like them in a few
years. They make much better things than Americans. Everything good is from
those places—cars, rice cookers, karaoke, televisions, cameras, and lots of films
and television shows". Then someone yelled out in disagreement: "[I]n my
opinion, those Hong Kong/Japanese videos and films are just no good.
Vietnamese television is so much better. Those countries have no culture any
more, it's all here, they just take western culture which is just about money
and sex, and they use it to destroy their own traditions". This was followed by a
vigorous debate about the pros and cons of East Asian popular culture.
This exchange seems to indicate that there is a rupture between official and
unofficial conceptions of East Asia in Vietnam that is lucidly expressed in the dif-
ferent reactions of the populace to cultural flows. Popular culture in Vietnam is
currently documenting a momentous upheaval in the relations between the
public, the media and the state. The social and cultural transformations that are
taking place are manifest in the eager response of the public to East Asian
popular culture in the form of Taiwanese soap operas, Hong Kong videos,
Cantopop and Japanese computer games (Nintendo and Sony Playstation) and
animation. Stars/singers from Hong Kong have huge followings in Vietnam,
eclipsing those of Vietnam's own. Television programs (in terms of hours and
variety) and video tape availability have grown, particularly since 1990. Although
in 1988 only one in ten Hanoi households had television (Unger 1991, 50), at
that time enterprising cafe owners would often set up a television on the street.

© Asian Studies Association of Australia 2002.

192 Mandy Thomas

In the early 1990s, one could see crowds of up to several dozen people sitting
and standing around televisions to watch Hong Kong videos, the only ones that
were available at the time. As private ownership of televisions has grown one no
longer sees these public groups of television watchers. In a survey I conducted in
early 1998, 87 households out of 100 owned a television and almost all had access
to television. Programs from East Asia are the most popular foreign programs
and occupy a large amount of programming time. The fact thatjacky Cheung's
concert in Ho Chi Minh City (US$50 for the top tickets) was sold out was only
partly due to the fact that one-third of the city's population is ethnic Chinese. In
Hanoi, where the Chinese population is insignificant, you can drop by any road-
side store that sells popstar photos and posters and find the Hong Kong stars
Leon Lai, Andy Lau and Aaron Kwok swamping the Vietnamese stars. Another
East Asian cultural icon throughout the country is Justice Pao, the Taiwanese TV
series. The theme song blares out on karaoke, and so many people watch it and
talk about it that some phrases used in the series have entered Vietnamese social
patois. Vietnam's television and newspapers frequently lament that their own pro-
ductions have never been able to appeal to popular taste on such a massive scale.
It is very common when discussing East Asian popular culture with Hanoi res-
idents for them to say they don't like or are not interested in East Asian cultural
products, but this alleged dislike of East Asian products is contradicted by the
huge audience for Taiwanese and Korean television programs. This mismatch
between what people enjoy and what they say they enjoy is clearly related to the
history of official discourses on cultural products. Unfavourable popular feeling
against East Asian popular culture might be seen as an expression of audiences'
desire to express their nationalist identification, pride in their own cultural pro-
ductions and separation from the rest of Asia. At the same time, it can be seen
as a critique of East Asian modernities that produce such products and an attempt
to redeem, salvage and preserve what is seen as authentic Vietnamese cultural
expression.
Audiences' actual consumption practices indicate a desire for the cosmopolitan
products of global consumer culture at the same time as reflecting an ambivalence
towards developing a consumer culture. These reactions encode in compact
form the structure of a transcultural regionalism in the making. The sense of con-
tradiction that seems to pervade East Asian popular culture in Vietnam becomes
one of ambivalence and discomfort, reflecting the complex and contradictory
nature of the relationship between the transactors who are dealing at the same
time with both overlapping worlds and cultural divides. East Asia is no longer seen
as politically and socially different from Vietnam, as popular culture is being
shared throughout the region. This sense of continuity and participation in a
regional cultural system has reduced spatial and cultural differences. At the same
time, this borrowing of styles and cultural expression in the realm of popular

© Asian Studies Association of Australia 2002.

 East Asian Popular Cultures in Contemporary Vietnam 193

culture has led to greater anxieties about Vietnam's ability to distinguish itself, and
set itself apart, except as the backward, poor relative of East Asia.

THE STATE AND EAST ASIAN POPULAR

CULTURE IN VIETNAM

In Vietnam the move from a centrally planned to a market economy began in

1986 with the policy of renovation [doi moi\. However, Vietnam's incorporation
into the global economy has been very slow. Over the last decade the most appar-
ent change in Vietnam, particularly in the north, has been the increased avail-
ability of goods. Throughout most of the 1980s, many reported that even if there
had been money to buy goods there was nothing to buy. There was no street
trading, only large state-managed outlets for the distribution of goods from state-
controlled cooperative farms and industries. As a result the streets did not bustle,
and as I was told by Hanoi residents, people were under the close scrutiny of
neighbours and employers. People travelled to and from their places of study
or work, but there were no hives of activity on the streets except during Tet
(Vietnamese New Year). During this period individuals only experienced a modi-
cum of social autonomy. So extreme was the lack of mobility and absence of
privacy that even leisure time was closely regulated. The economic transforma-
tions led to a revolution of consumption patterns and most importantly to the
possibility of people congregating in groups in noodle soup shops, at beauty par-
lours, and with tea and cigarette sellers on the pavements. The vibrant urban
culture that grew out of these changes evolved in directions too diverse to be con-
trolled by the Party or government. Nevertheless, the Party understood the link
between foreign consumer culture and public crowding and saw the potential for
civil unrest that could result from unchecked consumption. Although it could do
little to stop the flow of products into the country, the Party has often attempted
to reinforce controls on the inflow of certain cultural products, and has defined
some of these as "cultural pollution".
When Vietnam was reunified in 1975 there was a major political directive to
remove foreign products from the south of the country. In general, the nation-
alist cause and socialist ideals were promoted by the arts, which were "to be
purged of the perfidious influence of Western bourgeois culture and provided
with a new focus, nationalist in form and socialist in content" (Duiker 1995,
181-82). In the south after 1975, journalists and writers were singled out for par-
ticular punishment by the party, many being sent to forced labour camps or
imprisoned (Jamieson 1993, 364). Since that time there have been several cam-
paigns to rid the country of foreign cultural "pollution", the most recent of these
being in 1996 (see Carruthers 2001). These efforts to reinvigorate Vietnam's

© Asian Studies Association of Australia 2002.

194 Mandy Thomas

"national" culture and define what is exterior or damaging to it have been inten-
sified by the effects of doi moi, which many in the Party have seen as a door that
has opened up not just the possibility of economic benefits but the fears of cul-
tural erosion. The 1996 campaign was described by one local reporter as a "minor
cultural revolution" (Tan Dinh 1996).

Instigated by the Central Party Secretariat, this nationwide movement

sought to "protect and develop the national character" through a massive
effort to investigate the importation, reproduction and circulation of
overseas cultural products ("Ban bi thu trung u o n g . . . " ) . In the course
of the campaign, vehicles with loudspeakers drove through the streets
calling on people to "eradicate 'noxious' culture and social evils and build
an orderly and civilized environment" ('Thanh pho va ca nuoc . . . " ) . The
confidence of foreign investors was shaken when in Hanoi billboards
bearing the brand names of companies like Panasonic, Kodak, Coca-Cola,
Aiwa, Tiger Beer and Sony were torn down without warning because they
featured English and other foreign-language slogans inscribed in letters
more prominent and colourful than those written in Vietnamese (Tan
Dinh 1996). Pornographic magazines were burnt. Pirated videocassette
copies of films from Hong Kong and Taiwan, Asian neighbours perceived
to have fallen victim to the western cultural rot, were singled out for par-
ticular attention. The comic artist But Saigon [The Saigon Pen] saw fit to
illustrate the risk posed by them in a picture of a foreign mercenary car-
rying a gun labelled "noxious culture", wearing an ammunition belt
loaded with video cassettes reading "violence", "sex", "horror" and "ghost
stories", and casting a shadow of ngoai luong, literally "foreign stream [of
culture]" (Saigon GiaiPhong, 12 January 1996, p.6). At the conclusion of
the first step of the campaign, 202,000 videocassettes and several hundred
thousand compact discs, laser discs and audio cassettes had been seized
and destroyed, and around half of the estimated 6,000 video rental stores
and "video cafes" in Ho Chi Minh City had been forced to temporarily
close down ("Khoi dau buoc ...", "Thi truong video . . . " ) . Those remain-
ing open were permitted to carry only stock approved by the censor3
(Carruthers 2001, 133-34).

The state's creation of categories of culture that are "outside" and "inside"
Vietnamese cultural boundaries is deeply problematic, not least because East Asia
is thought of as both the West and the non-West and thus fits awkwardly into
the common occidentalist discourses of the state. Ashley Carruthers has looked
at the reception of overseas Vietnamese cultural products in Vietnam and has
some insight into this, and I think in many ways there is a symbolic equivalence

© Asian Studies Association of Australia 2002.

 East Asian Popular Cultures in Contemporary Vietnam 195

between overseas Vietnamese and East Asian people in the eyes of those at home.
Both categories are not just Asian but also "almost" western, both Vietnamese
and not. Where the state continues to frame much of the discourse on globali-
sation in occidentalist terms, East Asia—like diasporic Vietnamese—disrupts the
power and effectiveness of the discourse. It is clear that within Asia there are per-
ceptions of hierarchies of national modernities within nation-states, Japan often
being seen as emblematic of a successful indigenisation of the West.
Notions in Vietnam of reaching modernity through technology indicate that
technologies are insufficient to make the modernity grade in the eyes of national
citizens. Rather, it is the "images" that are conveyed that enable a nation-state to
be seen as modern by itself and its regional neighbours. East Asian cultural power
has become linked to East Asia's ability to control and circulate these images.
This is where the bodily similarity achieves such symbolic capital—when these
images of similar bodies are circulating they are empowering for their ability to
signify that the global, transnational image has engendered "bodies like ours"
and can thus signify the powerful Asian presence on the global stage.
Yet in Vietnam, East Asia does not seem familiar but does not easily fit into the
category of "foreign"; it thus continues to unsettle and intervene in the state's
vision of a clear cultural boundary between Vietnam and the rest of the world.
Japan is not only viewed with ambivalence because of its colonial history in
Vietnam and its neo-colonial engagement with third-world Asia in terms of trade
and aid. The appeal of the cultural products that it creates and its image of ide-
alised economic success and power, combined with Vietnam's desire to emulate
this makes its contradictory position even more potent. The state, however, con-
tinues to set up a cultural polarity by indicating that East Asia, and Japan in par-
ticular, signifies a dystopic undoing through its labour practices in Vietnam, the
stereotype of sexual perversity of Japanese businessmen in Vietnam (numerous
articles have appeared in Vietnamese newspapers accusing Japanese and South
Korean men of involvement in child prostitution and lurid sex acts) and the
images of Japan as a country where "Asian values" are being eroded through
family breakdown. The next section will consider how the enjoyment of East
Asian cultural productions in Vietnam can be viewed as an act of resistance to
the regime.

EAST ASIAN POPULAR CULTURE AND RESISTANCE4

The enjoyment of certain cultural forms, and the "capacities for pleasure and
conceptions of pleasure" are mobilised by a configuration of cultural and his-
torical meanings (Mercer 1986, 66). In other words, what is considered to be
"entertaining" at any given moment is contingent upon cultural systems of mean-

© Asian Studies Association of Australia 2002.

196 Mandy Thomas

ings at particular sites. In Vietnam until very recently, the powerful intervention
of the state in the desires and needs of the populace was successful in imple-
menting a regime of pleasure associated with nationalist ideals. According to
Mercer (1986, 55), the imposition of desires upon the populace is part of a wider
political environment in which there is some persuasion, some resistance and
some negotiation. Thus, the present popularity of Korean movies, Hong Kong
singers and Taiwanese actors in Vietnam, like the earlier attraction to national
figures, is inseparable from the dominant ideology of the moment and the every-
day cultural and social worlds of the individual consumer. These celebrities, all
popular icons, are meaningful because they are hieroglyphs, instantiations of
worlds in the making, of tastes, ideologies and relations of power in the wider
social environment of Vietnam. Vietnam is on the brink of becoming a fully
fledged media culture in which popular narratives and cultural icons are reshap-
ing political views, constructing tastes and values, crystallising the market
economy and, as Kellner suggests, "providing the materials out of which people
forge their very identities" (1995, 1).
If the media is as Hartley suggests "a visualisation of society" (1996, 210) the
recent foray into media culture, in which East Asian imagery is a dominant theme,
represents a dramatic turnaround. Until the policy of doi moi began in Vietnam
in 1986, the role of the media was to spread propaganda, and it focused less on
reporting news than on educating the populace. Material that I gathered from
interviews conducted in 1998 about popular culture with a cross-section of Hanoi
residents indicates that attraction to East Asian popular culture and electronic
imagery is still viewed as transgressive, and as such is a political act. During the
government's 1996 attempt to purge the country of foreign cultural products
many foreign videos and music tapes (diasporic and from East Asia) were seized
and destroyed, and karaoke parlours were closed down (Carruthers 2001). In spite
of the vigour of the campaign, though, consumers were still able to buy these
products illegally. The state's actions in banning such products appears to have
increased their allure and value to consumers, and has further intensified the
sense that these products are politically subversive and inflammatory.
From the interviews I conducted5 it appears that East Asian popular culture
in Vietnam signifies prosperity and sophistication and engenders longing—a
longing for a richer consumer world, for technical expertise and creativity, and
for societies that foster these elements. The attraction to the cultural productions
of these societies is partly a response to the suddenly expanding role of the media,
which has fuelled an interest in this cultural domain but has also led to political
awareness of the potency of the media. This form of transnationalism from
"below" (the everyday practices of ordinary people that may span at least two
nations) is becoming a social space through which coalitions of people may exer-
cise power that transcends national boundaries (Basch, Glick-Schiller and

© Asian Studies Association of Australia 2002.

 East Asian Popular Cultures in Contemporary Vietnam 197

Szanton-Blanc 1992, 5). In other words, the affinity for the cultural products of
East Asia has become laden with political meaning as the rapport is also with an
unfamiliar but attractive social and political world that is inaccessible to many
Vietnamese. As indicated above, the historical association with East Asian cultural
products as being fundamentally opposed to the aims and ideologies of the state
makes them somewhat subversive. What is interesting is that during the cam-
paigns to rid Vietnam of foreign cultural products no East Asian programs were
dropped from television programming. This indicates that the campaign was a
rhetorical strategy for the state to publicly regain control of Vietnamese cultural
life. The Party would have been aware of the dangers for political stability of drop-
ping people's favourite programs. Thus, at present the state and the populace
constantly negotiate the terms of the new transnational relationships with
regional neighbours, and both are acutely aware of the political nature of popular
culture under such a regime.
Another dark undercurrent in contemporary Vietnam is that foreigners are
viewed ambivalently as both bringing prosperity and opportunities and at the
same time inflicting a sense of inequality and inadequacy on the Vietnamese. This
has led to a chronic sense of ambivalence towards East Asia. At the same time
as viewing East Asian cultural productions as slick and technically superior, the
state continues to exhibit fear and loathing of competition and "external" cul-
tural influences. As East Asian singers, television programs and animation have
become more and more popular, the state has been forced to acknowledge that
local programming does not satisfy the needs of Vietnamese consumers. The
foreign artists and musicians have, however, been a rich source of creative influ-
ence on local Vietnamese artists, and have allowed them to move away from
nationalist and patriotic themes to new material, which is often stylistically quite
different, staged and performed in a more globally popular modality. For
example, a video clip of Hanoi's most popular local singer, My Linh, consists of
the singer singing mournful love songs, wearing luxurious clothes and framing
herself around the pools and sophisticated ambience in the luxurious grounds
of Hanoi's Daewoo Hotel, a joint venture between South Korea and Vietnam.
Thus, while the state attempts to define and regulate what "inside" culture is in
Vietnam, there is a free flow of creative influence across the imagined cultural
divide, with Vietnamese cultural producers rushing to remodel their forms of
entertainment as they incorporate influences from beyond the state's grasp.

CIVIL SOCIETY OR POPULAR CULTURE?

As Bennett (1986) argues, popular culture is the set of practices and activities
that engages the population in their material worlds, but also provides a zone in

© Asian Studies Association of Australia 2002.

198 Mandy Thomas

which different "cultural values and ideologies meet and intermingle" and wrestle
with each other "in their attempts to secure the spaces within which they become
influential in framing and organising popular experience and consciousness"
(Bennett 1986, 19). It is as a battleground for values that popular culture most
strongly differentiates itself from civil society, which is always necessarily opposi-
tional. Popular culture, by contrast, engages with both dominant and subordi-
nate cultural forms in its generation of the popular.
My interviews revealed that East Asian cultural products are viewed as anti-Party
and that the peaceful numbers that East Asian celebrities are attracting are
indicative of a new post-communist media revolution that is leaving the Party iso-
lated from public appeal. The triad of linked concepts of celebrity, media and
democracy is intensifying in the same way that ".. .journalism . . . has shown a
tendency throughout the twentieth century to take over and textualise the demo-
cratic function of the nation" (Hardey 1996, 200). This shift to media culture also
represents a fading in significance of a de-personalised public sphere that has
been promoted by the Party, in favour of a public sphere dominated by popular
media. The media transformations in Vietnam map out social and political
change and provide a cartography of a nation passing through a phase of criti-
cal re-evaluation.6
Popular culture often evades the formal institutional structures of power in
appealing to the populace and is almost always linked with the market economies
that legitimise it (Marshall 1997, xii). Because the media in Vietnam is primarily
viewed as a potent means for engagement in class struggle and an instrument of
the Party (Hiang-khng Heng 1997, I), the political institutions in Vietnam in
effect suppressed the emergence of an "unofficial" culture until quite recently.
Cultural products in Vietnam presently sit in the awkward position of needing to
be sanctioned by the power structures at the same time as being spontaneous
expressions of popular appeal. While the number of tabloids and glossy maga-
zines has been growing since the policy of doi moi was instituted a decade ago,
die state still maintains strict, if sometimes hidden, control over censorship and
editorial freedom (Hiang-khng Heng 1997,1).
Although the media in Vietnam are changing, the state does not see informa-
tion as a marketable commodity or as entertainment. The development of popu-
larity among cultural products in Vietnam dius requires something in addition
to media support. It depends upon the engagement of consumers with tangible
cultural products of the icon. The advent of market economics and globalisation
brought the notion and practice of pop culture with its concomitant icons and
cultural products to Vietnam. Throughout Vietnam, celebrities are being memo-
rialised in obtainable objects, with the media only providing the initial catalyst
for the interest in a particular individual. Celebrities must be brought into the
home embodied in artifacts. It is worth noting here that it is only the Vietnamese

© Asian Studies Association of Australia 2002.

 East Asian Popular Cultures in Contemporary Vietnam 199

and regional products that are affordable and accessible. As yet, the availability
of products associated with European and American celebrities is minimal. An
integral component of the new appeal of celebrities in Vietnam is that they signify
a consumer world beyond Vietnam and are a material representation of capital-
ist democracies. In this way, the cultural products associated with fame have
become a visualisation of modernity, or as Hartley suggests, "of the promise of
comfort, progress and freedom" (1996, 200). There is a dearth of non-Asian con-
sumer items in Vietnam, partly because of their cost, so it has been East Asian
popular culture with its attendant array of products that has come to most
clearly symbolise urbane cosmopolitanism and "cool". These posters, cassettes,
soap operas, CDs, videos and even T-shirts with the East Asian pop image or name
of the celebrity emblazoned on them are freely available in Ho Chi Minh City
and Hanoi. Unlike neighbouring socialist China which witnessed Mao revolu-
tionary paraphernalia turned into a massive pop industry of T-shirts with slick
slogans, posters with New Age images, and cover designs for rock music CDs
(Barme 1996), Vietnam did not do the same with Ho Chi Minh's heritage. The
commodities associated with popular icons are usurping old mass cultural icons
such as the bust of Ho Chi Minh or lapel pins/badges of the emblems of the
socialist state.7 It is therefore evident that with the rapid increase in the avail-
ability of consumer items, the attraction to East Asian celebrities is growing. At
the same time, as the relationship between popular icons and commodification
has intensified there has been a corresponding decrease in the circulation of and
interest in the iconography of the socialist regime.
For young people in Hanoi the admiration of East Asian celebrities who are
apolitical is politically symbolic, an incipient political act of opposition. In choos-
ing to admire a singer over a communist political leader, individuals realise that
in the past this would have been dishonourable, as indicated in the following
comments of one 18 year-old respondent:

My parents don't think it is a good thing that my sisters and brothers like
these singers and like the posters of films from Hong Kong. They think
that we will lose our culture and have no values. Sometimes I hide the
magazines from my mother because it would upset her so much.

This response indicates that young people may be aware that not so long ago the
Party would have banned what youth today find most entertaining and appeal-
ing. It also indicates that the collective Vietnamese memory still harbours fear of
the consequences of unofficial popular activities.
The shift in appeal from national songs and films to a manifold set of popular
entertainments signals the increasing influence of concepts of the popular that
are unrelated to national strivings (see Marshall 1997, x). The emerging popular

© Asian Studies Association of Australia 2002.

200 Mandy Thomas

celebrities in Vietnam offer a set of tropes through which transgressive ideo-

logies and desires may find an outlet. The type of individuality that has been
revered in Vietnam prior to today is that of people who have been marked by a
career in the service of their country, as moral exemplars and emblems of nation-
hood.8 Those raised in the political environment of the post-1954 socialist trans-
formation of the north and the war for national reunification continue to be
influenced by the public culture of the period.9
According to one older person, "[w]e don't gain anything from these famous
people. The media is for education. I don't read it when they speak about
someone who is a singer or so on". The association between the mass media and
nation-building is still strongly felt by older people in Hanoi.
The consumption of foreign media products and popular icons in Vietnam
must be seen as transgressive, because audiences have been made explicitly aware
of the political and social forces at work in the production and censorship of
images and information. In this way, it is clear that in consuming East Asian
popular culture, the Vietnamese populace is not acting as an unthinking mass.
Rather, the contemporary icons of popular culture in Vietnam are being engaged
in the social lives of the audiences in all their diversity. These acts are both per-
sonally pleasurable and politically expressive even though they are not explicitly
politically motivated.
There is potential for the new communities of feeling that arise at these
moments to be revolutionary—the new public figures in Vietnam no longer
symbolise a nation, as did the pre-eminent public figure, Ho Chi Minh, and
popular entertainment is no longer located as Vietnamese. Here, popular culture
is, as Fiske (1989) and Hall (1981) argue, reconfigured into a cultural battlefield
in which differing representations of the popular imagination are contested. The
close scrutiny of foreign celebrities marks them in particular in this battle as
"icons of democracy and democratic will" (Marshall 1997, 246). East Asian
popular culture in Vietnam thus signals for the nation a loss of ideological
purpose and an unravelling of images of political struggle, in which a public is
being shaped but is also itself constructing political and cultural meaning. East
Asian consumption represents material success and private pleasures but is also
seen as the outcome and evidence of some degree of personal freedom.

FRACTURED IMAGES OF EAST ASIA

In contemporary Vietnam it is apparent that there is still a good deal of political

control over consumption, as well as an association between consumer goods and
decadence or "social evil". This paper has argued that to participate in East Asian
popular culture is a way of constituting selfhood against a regime that the popu-

© Asian Studies Association of Australia 2002.

 East Asian Popular Cultures in Contemporary Vietnam 201

lace may wish to oppose. Vietnam is currently being called upon to reflect on the
status of its changing nationhood in the rapidly transforming social and political
theatre of globalisation. The attraction to East Asian popular culture that is
fuelled by the media offers new resources for the construction of nation in
contemporary Vietnam.
As tastes for cultural products in Vietnam are being re-cast, the aesthetics of
East Asia intersect with images of East Asian modernity and mass consumption
to produce an increasing desire, often unfulfilled, for the products of wealthy
Asian countries. Vietnam is now being asked to confront its place in the world
and the region, but the state often responds by constructing cultural polarities
between itself and the "outside". In all the commotion of globalisation and new
transnational encounters, and in a world where money, information and mobil-
ity are creating new dynamics of inequality, Vietnam is experiencing a weaken-
ing of both the state and its national ties. At the same time, the sense of a regional
attachment is growing increasingly complex. While East Asian cultural products
have gained an important place in everyday consumer culture in Vietnam, the
imagined Asia exemplified by these products is one in which Vietnam feels both
strange and familiar, attracted and repelled. The reception of East Asian cultural
products is part of a process of popular reinscription of images of modernity into
the making of the future Vietnamese nation-state, in which the region is simul-
taneously mirror and bete noire.

NOTES
1 I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of this paper for their helpful comments
and suggestions.
2
Although the term "East Asia" normally refers to Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong,
I use it here loosely not as a geographical descriptor but rather as a political and economic
one that refers also to highly industrialised export-oriented Asian countries such as Singapore
and Malaysia. While China exports a large number of products to Vietnam, interviews that I
conducted with young people in Hanoi in November 2001 indicated that China is generally
not seen to be as "modern" as Japan and the other countries listed above. This is possibly due
to the high consumption of Japanese technological products in Vietnam (motorbikes, stereo
systems, Walkmans etc.) while the main types of products exported from China to Vietnam are
clothing, toys and machinery.
3 It was estimated that 85-90 per cent of stock in Saigon's 3,000 unlicensed video stores was
foreign [Thi truong video. . . ] .
4 A version of this section has been published elsewhere (see Thomas and Hiang-Khng Heng
2001).
5 I undertook interviews with a wide range of Hanoi residents from different socioeconomic
and age groups. The interviews focused on eliciting information about what people do in their
leisure time, what forms of media they consume, what types of music/film/television they like,

© Asian Studies Association of Australia 2002.

202 Mandy Thomas

who their favourite celebrities are, and so on. The fieldwork was conducted during several
short trips to Vietnam in 1998, 1999 and late 2001.
6 See Hall (1986) for a theoretical overview of the relations between popular culture and
political leadership.
7 The mass culture icons of the socialist era were not really products in a market-place but units
in a socialist distribution system, which also indicates a differentiation between the "mass"
culture of the past and the "pop" culture of today.
8 On the subject of the relationship between public artists and the socialist regime, Duiker writes:
Under party rule, the creative arts were thus dedicated to two major objectives: to
stimulate a sense of national identity and commitment through the encouragement
of indigenous forms of art, music, and literature and to promote the growth of a social-
ist ethic through the creation of a new culture based on the principles of socialist
realism. In order to promote national pride, traditional forms of art, music and dance
were revived and transformed to serve modern purposes. The ca dao and other forms
of literary and musical expression were transformed into a medium for serving the
cause of social revolution and national reunification. In novels, plays and poems,
Northern Vietnamese writers portrayed in romantic terms the glorious struggle of
their countrymen to bring about socialist culture in the north and in achieving reuni-
fication with the South (Duiker 1995, 182).
9 Attitudes not just about public figures but also about western music in the post-reunification
period are indicated by the national newspaper Nhan Dan [The People's Daily], which in 1979
reported an official's comments on the youth in Ho Chi Minh City. He argued that "some of
the youths who are influenced by neocolonialism and the old social system have been infected
with such bad habits as laziness, selfishness, parasitism, vagabondism, pursuing a good time
etc". Another official argued that western music would encourage people to "turn their backs
on our people's life of labour and combat, regret the past and idolise imperialism" (In Nhan
Dan, 5 September 1979, quoted in Duiker 1995, 185-86). The cultural life of the period was
completely dictated by the party—"Radio, television, newspapers, journals, poetry, songs,
novels, motion pictures, all were transformed into high volume, high redundancy transmitters
of selected themes, new values and new role models" (Jamieson 1993, 362).

REFERENCES

Altschull, J. Herbert. 1995. Agents of power: The media and public policy. New York: Longman.
Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalisation. Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press.
Barme, Geremie. 1996. The irresistible fall and rise of Mao Zedong. In Shades of Mao--The
posthumous cult of the great leader, ed. G. R. Barme: 3-112. New York: M. E. Sharpe.
Basch, L., N. Glick-Schiller and C. Szanton-Blanc, eds. 1994 Nations unbound: Transnational
projects, postcolonial predicaments, and deterritorialized nation-states. Amsterdam and New Yo
Gordon and Breach.
Bennett, Tony. 1986. The politics of the "popular". In Popular culture and social relations, ed.
T. Bennett, C. Mercer and J. Woollacott: 6-21. Philadelphia: Open University.

© Asian Studies Association of Australia 2002.

 East Asian Popular Cultures in Contemporary Vietnam 203

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Legitimation and structure interest. In Distinction: The social critique of
the judgement of taste. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bui Tin. 1995. From cadre to exile: Memoirs of a Vietnamese journalist. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books,
(first published as Following the trail of Ho Chi Minh: The memoirs of a North Vietnamese colonel.
London: Hurst.)
Canetti, Elias. 1984. Crowds and power. London: Penguin Books.
Carruthers, A. 2001. National identity, diasporic anxiety and music video culture in Vietnam.
In House of glass: Modernity and the state in Southeast Asia, ed. Yao Souchou: 119-49.
Singapore: ISEAS.
Cho, Haejoang. 2001. A study of modernity, identity and cultural industries: A case study
of the Korean Pop Wave in Asia. Paper presented at the Lingnan University workshop on
"Contemporary (East) Asian Popular Culture: current developments".
Duiker, William J. 1995. Vietnam: Revolution in transition. Boulder, San Francisco and Oxford:
Westview Press.
Fiske, John. 1989. Understanding popular culture. Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Hall, Stuart. 1981. Notes on deconstructing the "popular". In People's history and socialist theory,
ed. R. Samuel: 227-40. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Hall, Stuart. 1986. Popular culture and the state. In Popular culture and social relations, ed.
T. Bennett, C. Mercer and J. Woollacott: 22-49. Philadelphia: Open University.
Hartley, John. 1996. Popular reality: Journalism, modernity and popular culture. London, New York,
Sydney and Auckland: Arnold.
Hebdige, Dick. 1988. Hiding in the light: On images and things. London: Routledge.
Hiang-Khng Heng, Russell. 1997. Media in Vietnam and the structure of its management.
Unpublished paper.
Howes, David, ed. 1996. Cross-cultural consumption: Global markets, local realities. London and
New York: Routledge.
Jamieson, Neil, J. 1993. Understanding Vietnam. Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford: University
of California Press.
Kellner, Douglas. 1995. Media culture: Cultural studies, identity and politics between the modern and
the postmodern. London and New York: Routledge.
Link, Perry, Richard Madsen and Paul G. Pickowicz, eds. 1989. Unofficial China: Popular culture
and thought in the People's Republic. Boulder, San Francisco and London: Westview Press.
McCormick, Barrett. 1995. Society and the state in Vietnam and China: The political conse-
quences of economic reform. Paper presented to the Vietnam-China Workshop, Australian
National University.
McPhillips, Kath. 1997. Postmodern canonisation. In Planet Diana: Cultural studies and global
mourning, ed. Re:Public: 87-91. Sydney: University of Western Sydney.
Marr, David G. 1997. Vietnamese youth in the 1990s. The Vietnam Review, no. 2,
Spring/Summer.
Marshall, P. D. 1997. Celebrity and power: Fame in contemporary culture. London and Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.

© Asian Studies Association of Australia 2002.

204 Mandy Thomas

Mercer, Colin. 1986. Complicit pleasures. In Popular culture and social relations, ed. J. Bennett,
C. Mercer and J. Woollacott: 50-68. Philadelphia: Open University.
Nguyen Khac Vien. 1974. Confucianism and Marxism. In Tradition and revolution in Vietnam,
ed. D. Marr and J. Werner. Berkeley: Indochina Resource Centre.
Nguyen Khac Vien and Phong Kien. 1982. American neo-colonialism in South Vietnam
1954-1975: Socio-cultural aspects. Vietnamese Studies 69: 1-122.
Polumbaum, Judy. 1990. The tribulations of China's journalists after a decade of reform. In
Voices of China: The interplay of politics and journalism, ed. Chin-Chuan Lee: 33-68. New York
and London: Guilford Press.
Re:Public, eds. 1997. Planet Diana: Cultural studies and global mourning. Sydney: University of
Western Sydney.
Schudson, Michael. 1989. Toward a comparative history of political communication. Compara-
tive Social Research 11.
Strinati, Dominic. 1995. An introduction to theories of popular culture. London and New York:
Routledge.
Thayer, Carlyle. 1991. Renovation and Vietnamese society: The changing role of government
and administration. In Doi Moi: Vietnam's renovation policy and performance, ed. D. Forbes, T.
Hull, D. G. Marr and B. Brogan: 21-33. Canberra: Department of Political and Social Change
Monographs, RSPAS, Australian National University.
Thayer, Carlyle. 1995. Introduction. In From cadre to exile: Memoirs of a Vietnamese journalist, Bui
Tin: vii-xiv. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, (first published as Following the trail of Ho Chi Minh:
The memoirs of a North Vietnamese colonel. London: Hurst.).
Thomas, Mandy. 1997. Diana at the cultural interface: The appropriation of Diana's story in
Vietnam and in the Vietnamese diaspora. In Planet Diana: Cultural studies and global mourn-
ing, ed. Re:Public: 149-54. Sydney: University of Western Sydney.
Thomas, Mandy and Russell Hiang-Khng Heng. 2001. Stars in the shadows: Celebrity, media
and the state in Vietnam. In House of glass: Modernity and the state in Southeast Asia, ed. Yao
Souchou. Singapore: ISEAS.
Truong Chinh. 1976. Towards the realisation of national unification on the state level. Vietnam
Quarterly, Spring: 31-35.
Unger, Esta S. 1991. Media and society: Sociocultural change in Vietnam since 1986. In Doi
Moi: Vietnam's renovation policy and performance, ed. D. Forbes, T. Hull, D. G. Marr and B.
Brogan: 46-53. Canberra: Department of Political and Social Change Monographs, RSPAS,
Australian National University.
Wyshogrod, Edith. 1990. Saints and postmodernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Newspapers and Magazines

Tuoi Tre [ Youth], Thanh Nien [ Youth], The Gioi An Ninh [ World Security], Hanoi Moi [New Hanoi],
CongAn ThanhPhoHo ChiMinh [Saigon Police], NhaBaova CongLuan [TheJournalist and Public
Opinion], Nhan Dan [ The People], Nguoi Lao Dong [ Workers], Bangkok Post.

© Asian Studies Association of Australia 2002.