42
Virginia Review of Asian Studies
THE BATTERED BODY AND HUMAN RIGHTS DISCOURSE IN VIETNAMESE AMERICAN NON-FICTION
Quan Manh Ha
The University of Montana
The Vietnamese communist regime united the long-divided country in April of 1975. Under its laws, history written by Vietnamese historians must comply with the government’s guiding criteria, which include criticizing French colonialism and American imperialism; lavishing encomia upon the leadership of the Communist Party and its governance; imbuing the Vietnamese people with the belief that communist victory and national unification brought justice, equality, freedom, and happiness throughout the country. Or as Christina Schwenkel observes, “Official history in Vietnam has selectively silenced certain pasts that fall outside the dominant paradigm of revolutionary history”—for example, it denies any validity to the historical perspectives articulated by those who had allied themselves with the former Saigon government.[1] Vietnamese historians who suggest positions contradictory to these directives will be silenced and probably prosecuted for expressing “reactionary” opinions and manifesting insubordinate behavior because, as Pham Van Dong, former Prime Minister of Vietnam, affirmed in his 1975 Independence Day speech: “[t]he victory of the revolutionary cause of our people is also a victory of the great doctrine of Marxism-Leninism, the peak of human wisdom, which has lighted our revolutionary path full of glorious victories.”[2] Discussing major characteristics of Vietnamese literature sanctioned under communism, Nguyen Hung Quoc, a Vietnamese Australian scholar, concludes:
Vietnamese communist literature is under one leadership: that of the Communist Party; writers must be members of one organization: the Vietnamese Authors Association; they share one ideology: Marxism and Leninism; they follow one approach to literature: socialist realism; they have one writing style: simplicity; they aim at one goal: to acknowledge the absolute power and righteousness leadership of the Communist Party, and to praise communist leaders and socialism; all published literary texts have one characteristic: politics.[3] (my translation)
The United States, since 1975, consistently has placed Vietnam on its list of countries that violate human rights, and particularly in regard to freedom of speech.[4] Due to the Vietnamese government’s strict censorship of verbal and written expression, the darker aspects of social life during the postwar period in southern Vietnam rarely are recorded in the history books that are published or legally accessed in Vietnam. If incidents embarrassing to the Communist Party are mentioned at all by Vietnamese historians, they are described only in subtle, tactful ways in order to circumvent proscription by the state-controlled publishing houses.
It is Vietnamese refugees living abroad (primarily anticommunist partisans and victims of repressive communist policies prior to their exodus) who openly discuss the communists’ power abuses. Thus, in an asylum-granting country, the refugee-historians draw attention to the suffering of the Vietnamese people in their homeland, on the one hand, and they register general condemnation of Vietnamese communism for its inhumane and barbarous practices, on the other. In this article, I argue that many first-generation Vietnamese American writers of non-fiction use the battered human body, and what Foucault describes as undemocratic space,[5] to criticize the Vietnamese communist government’s violation of human rights and expose the regime’s unacceptable treatment of those who had affiliated themselves politically or militarily either with the United States and/or the former Saigon government. In addition, the physical body is also used by victims as an object of negotiation to obtain assistance or freedom from the communists in power. Schwendel states:
There is a long historical relationship between U.S. human rights discourses and challenges to sovereignty [...]. Representations of ‘savage’ communists with no value for human life or respect for freedom justified military intervention and attempts to ‘save’ the country [Vietnam] from communism.[6]
Human beings generally are not indifferent to the pain of others, and they certainly are not indifferent to their own pain, suffering, and violation of their human rights; in Arne Johan Vetlessen’s words, most people “call for an explanation” after hearing stories about violations of individuals’ physical beings.[7] Those former victims who give voice to discussing and recording such abuses generally are attempting to garner support from Western readerships and governments for their concern for human rights violations in Vietnam or justification for their own decisions (and the decisions of others like them) to flee Vietnam and resettle in Western countries as political refugees. Outside Vietnam, they often attempt to use violations of human rights in the homeland to vindicate the Vietnam War as a just cause—i.e., a war fought to prevent the spread of communism and to establish democracy in South Vietnam. Nevertheless, human rights violations in postwar Vietnam are an issue of international concern.
Fiction generally is a less reliable source for the factual detail required in the study of the actual physical abuses of those accused of harboring anticommunist sentiments. Therefore, the memoir, a non-fiction genre, is the focus in this study. Vietnamese American memoirs treated here are written as first-hand, eye-witness accounts by those who actually experienced and suffered or personally observed the hardships, injustice, and prejudicial treatment imposed upon its victims by the communist regime or the authorities it placed in power.
A goodly number of memoirs, autobiographies, and life narratives about post-1975 life under Vietnamese communism have been written in English and published in the United States. They share similar thematic treatments of their subjects: their authors portray a postwar Vietnam in which citizens continue to suffer severe discrimination under communism, and they express a very human yearning for the justice, freedom, and equality that are proclaimed in the theories but rarely realized in practice by the communist government among the Vietnamese people under its authority. These negative realities of life are addressed mostly by former pro-Saigon regime southerners, while most northerners celebrated the unification of the country and Vietnam’s transformation into an independent, socialist nation under one government and one flag.
I will concentrate here upon Jade Ngoc Quang Huynh’s South Wind Changing (1994) and Kien Nguyen’s The Unwanted (2001) because they well describe the tragic experiences of thousands of victims mistreated under the communist regime.[8] South Wind Changing is a memoir that records the author’s experience in communist reeducation camps, and The Unwanted relates the author’s childhood experience as an Amerasian in postwar Vietnam. It should be noted that these texts remain suppressed in Vietnam because they do not conform to the government’s censorial criteria noted above. Thus, according to the communist government, they voice the opinions of the betrayers of the nation, or they represent the voices of the puppets and lackeys of the Americans, most of whom departed Vietnam to seek political asylum in the United States or elsewhere.
While Asian American literature generally focuses on issues related to ethnicity, race, biculturalism, assimilation, and identity crises experienced in the United States, early Vietnamese American texts generally treat different concerns: they concentrate, for example, on post-1975 life under the communist regime and the enforcement of its policies, and on the imperatives that forced them to flee from the hostile political environment in Vietnam. Such texts can be classified under the rubric “survival literature,” a term coined by Kali Tal to describe works that most often are published at least ten years after the “traumatic experience in question” by the survivors who feel a need to examine a “trauma victim’s notion of self and community.”[9] In her controversial article “Denationalization Reconsidered: Asian American Cultural Criticism at the Theoretical Crossroads,” Sau-ling C. Wong distinguishes diasporic literature from domestic literature as follows:
A diasporic perspective emphasizes Asian Americans as one element in the global scattering of peoples of Asian origin, in contrast to what I call a domestic perspective that stresses the status of Asian Americans as an ethnic/racial minority within the national boundaries of the United States.[10]
Applying Tal’s useful concept and Wong’s dichotomy to the subject-works examined in this article, it becomes more obvious that early Vietnamese American literature represents the diasporic perspective. The realities portrayed in the two early texts selected for analysis here help explain important formative and determining factors in the backgrounds, social status, and anticommunist points of view of first- or sometimes second-generation Vietnamese Americans. Nguyen Hung Quoc has classified early Vietnamese literature produced outside the boundaries of Vietnam under the category of “literature in exile.” Despite controversy concerning his use of this terminology, the literature it categorizes does express the condemnation of Vietnamese communist political power, opposition to communist ideology and propaganda, and the expression of a basic human desire for human freedom that define the Vietnamese American exile point of view.[11]
Reeducation Camps, the Condemned Body, and Politics
Many early Vietnamese American authors describe their painful experiences in the communist reeducation camps or their tragic experiences as “boat people”—experiences that define their identities as political refugees, haunt their thoughts and memories, and remain present always in the peripheral vision of their consciousness. Most of the memoirs describing life in the postwar reeducation camps are quite similar in their treatment of their recurrent themes: they expose how they, as inmates, were dehumanized, humiliated, tortured, punished, and brainwashed by the communist cadres and camp guards. Soon after Vietnam was reunified in April 1975, partisans who had supported the South Vietnamese government and/or allied themselves with the American military mission were requested to file reports at local police stations on their previous political allegiances, professional activities, and family connections. However, the local authorities had blatantly lied to them, saying that if they told the truth and wrote a detailed, honest self-criticism, they would be granted amnesty for the “crimes” that they had committed during the national revolutionary war against the American invaders and the Saigon government they had supported. They were asked to prepare enough food and pack enough clothing for a short reeducation session, but actually they were transferred almost immediately to remote, deserted areas of the country to suffer forced labor and corporal punishment for long periods of time—from one to twelve years, depending on how their offenses were defined and classified.
In English, the term reeducation euphemistically carries positive nuances of meaning: the word education contained within it signifies the enrichment of one’s knowledge or the improvement of one’s skills. In the Introduction to To Be Made Over: Tales of Socialist Reeducation in Vietnam, Huynh Sanh Thong clarifies the significance of the equivalent of the English term reeducation in Vietnamese:
The term ‘reeducation,’ with its pedagogical overtones, does not quite convey the quasi-mystical resonance of cải-tạo in Vietnamese. Cải (‘to transform’) and tạo (‘to create’) combine to literally mean an attempt at ‘recreation,’ at ‘making over’ sinful or incomplete individuals. Born again as ‘Socialist men and women’ (con người xã-hội chủ-nghĩa), they will supposedly pave the way to the Communist millennium.[12]
Huynh Sanh Thong is but one among many commentators who are critical of the use of the term reeducation in reference to the internment camps where victims were detained. According to Neil L. Jamieson, in his Understanding Vietnam, the population of southern Vietnam after the war was around twenty million people, and one million of those citizens of the former Republic of Vietnam were required by the communist regime to register for reeducation. The targeted individuals were intellectuals, politicians, religious leaders, police and military officers, artists, journalists, and writers of the old regime. In order to transform the detainees into citizens useful in a new, “liberated” Vietnam, the communist government set up camps that were neither schools nor prisons. They were “psychological [and] spiritual ‘boot camps’” in which people were indoctrinated into communist dogma, Ho Chi Minh’s ideology, and socialist ideals.[13] In other words, the camps were centers for brainwashing the detainees, who were forced to listen daily to homilies about the evils of imperialism and capitalism and the virtues of socialism and communism, and they were centers for the corporeal punishment of the “wrong-doers.”
Politics and the Human Body, edited by Jean Bethke Elshtain and J. Timothy Cloyd, emphasizes that torture as an instrument of coercion is very often closely associated with the enforcement of political agendas; it is pain impressed upon the human body that adjusts one’s understanding of political goals, power relations, and democratic spheres of influence,[14] concepts that are fully elaborated upon by Foucault in Discipline and Punish. Cloyd, in his chapter on “Torture, Human Rights, and the Body” distinguishes significant differences between discipline, punishment, and torture, and these distinctions are useful in the discussion below. Discipline entails a set of actions aiming toward integrating a person into an established or expected system of behavioral uniformity. Punishment is used when an individual violates this established uniformity, but “its goals remain within the notion of integration.” To the contrary, however, torture does not serve the purpose of integration: it aims only to “inflict severe pain as a means of punishment, or coercion,” and the individual bears the physical, psychological, and emotional scars of its degradation.[15]
In South Wind Changing, Huynh describes scenes that illustrate uses and abuses of the human body to bend the will of people, and both subdue and humiliate them. Immediately after the communist takeover of South Vietnam, Huynh witnessed a young, handsome man (who could have been a southern colonel or a general’s son, as the author speculates) being handcuffed, blindfolded, and led to a public scaffold where he was asked to state his last request. He was executed for his refusal to acknowledge the victory of the communists and for his loyalty to the Republic of Vietnam: “The guards held their guns up, aimed at the young men [the young officer and other prisoners], and shot them. I saw blood sprinkle all over as their bodies shook while their heads fell to one side and they died.”[16] The purpose of such public executions was to make other people realize that the slightest offence would likely receive corporeal or capital punishment and that detainees should in no way challenge the communists’ own feelings of terror and paranoia.
In the reeducation camps, Huynh and other inmates subjected to hard labor, limited access to tools, and a hostile working environment, were ordered to convert an airfield into a garden; they worked until their hands blistered and “turned numb,” but they were not allowed to stop.[17] Based on the circumstances that prevail in the general exercise of discipline, punishment, and torture, as Cloyd has explained, the camp guards were not attempting to integrate inmates into uniformity with Communist Party ideals because the labor that the detainees were forced to provide passed beyond the rubrics of discipline and punishment and fell under the category of torture.