Organizer and Chair: Erica J. Peters, Independent Scholar

Discussant: Peter Zinoman, University of California, Berkeley

This panel aims to complicate received ideas about the physical movement of Vietnamese people during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Setting aside standard images of migrants and refugees, the panelists investigate particular daily motions -- eating, caring for children, building, farming, and navigating both the literal waterways of the Mekong Delta and (more broadly) an ever-changing physical and social environment. From a disciplinary perspective, the panel also sets aside the standard treatment of pre-colonial, colonial, and wartime experiences as incommensurate, hoping to spark discussion of daily life as a fruitful area of research across broad historical periods.
            Peters asks how long-term political and economic developments modified how people cooked, ate, and drank in their homes and in public. Firpo examines colonial-era policies that placed the children of poor Vietnamese in orphanages and prompted debates over cultural claims and the child's place within the nation. MacLean details the semi-successful methods used by cadres to mobilize huge teams of peasant laborers in the late 1950s to construct a massive irrigation project that made agricultural collectivization in the Red River Delta technically feasible. Finally, Biggs chronicles the changes wrought by the four horsepower diesel motor in the bayous of the Mekong Delta, which transformed how peasants moved and interacted along the region's rivers and canals. Taken together, the papers consider how past patterns of movement, the social organization of labor and leisure, and new forms of technology reconfigured relationships among individuals, the state, and local interpretations of traditions.

Erica J. Peters, Independent Scholar

This paper explores the evolution of kitchen practices and table manners during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as part of a larger project examining the changing foods and drink of people living in Vietnam during this period. How people ate changed, as successive Vietnamese and then French colonial rulers encouraged domestic trade and some degree of cultural transformation in their attempts to consolidate control over rebellious regions and up through the mountains. How people perceived their own food practices also changed radically, as well as how they perceived the practices of "others" who lived inside and outside the Vietnamese kings' realm (or former realm). Diverse sources, including government reports, poetry, popular sayings, travelers' accounts, postcards, newspaper articles and advertisements help evoke a period of dramatic changes in the arenas of both high politics and daily life. Without going so far as to argue, for instance, that an increase in chopsticks use after 1830 signaled a greater acceptance of centralized Vietnamese rule, or that an increase in the use of silverware around 1900 signaled a greater acceptance of French rule, this paper examines links between the political and the seemingly non-political, to try to tease out how people experienced the changing times through the changing motions of cooking and dining: their own, their children's, their neighbors', and those of strangers.

Christina E. Firpo, University of California- Los Angeles

As part of the early 1930s Depression relief programs the French colonial government in Indochina expanded the child welfare system. The government opened new orphanages and day care facilities throughout the cities and countryside. The new orphanages, however, became the center of a heavy debate within the Vietnamese feminist movement. While the Vietnamese feminists succeeded in their goal to change public perceptions of poor children from social pariahs to victims of circumstance, they questioned the methods of child care. The government offered one option for child care: to physically remove the child from the family environment and the mother's care and place the child into orphanages so that the mother could work. The feminists unsuccessfully urged the government to follow the program used for the poor white French: to allow the children to remain in their homes under the mother's care and give the mothers subsidy payments. This paper will investigate why the government sought to remove the child from the family environment. At the center of this debate I will explore claims to cultural ownership over bodies and the debate over the perceptions of the future role of the child in the colonial and post-colonial nation.

Ken MacLean, Emory University

Vietnamese living in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam during the late 1950s participated in a construction boom. In part, the new construction was a response to a pressing need. Vital infrastructure, such as railways and waterworks, had been badly damaged or completely destroyed during the First Indochina War (1946-1954). But the reconstruction effort served other purposes as well. First, the construction helped make state socialism manifest, that is physically tangible and, in theory, demonstrably superior to what came before it. Second, the techniques used emphasized socialist forms of collective labor, which created new opportunities for the Communist Party of Vietnam to more fully extend itself directly into people’s everyday lives. I develop these contentions by focusing on the Bac Hung Hai Irrigation Project, which was built in stages between 1958 and 1962 to overcome chronic food shortages and to provide flood control for the "Left Bank" region southeast of Hanoi.  I explore how cadres working under the supervision of the Ministry of Irrigation as well as Chinese and Soviet technical advisors mobilized tens of thousands of peasants to build the massive project covering 210,000 hectares. The project, upon its completion, was the largest of its kind and, in theory, enabled the collectivization of agriculture to proceed in the lower Red River Delta. Interviews with cadres and laborers, many of whom were conscripted, will be examined against archival and other visual media to explore how bureaucratic categories and practices shape what can be remembered about the project.

Motor-Powered Mekong: The Vietnamese - "Kohler" Revolution in the Delta

David A. Biggs, University of California, Riverside

While the American military and civilian presence in Vietnam is most often associated with combat and the technology-heavy presence of some 500,000 foreign troops, the period from 1954 to 1975 was also one of unprecedented, often unregulated foreign aid and technological change. While many aid projects failed, the mechanization campaign to introduce and sell small diesel engines for boats, water pumps, and portable rice mills succeeded far beyond expectations. By 1963, some 80% of all families in the Mekong Delta owned one of the 4-12 hp engines known generally as "may ko-le" for the Kohler Corporation that introduced the engines with its company logo stamped on the fuel tank. By 1975 an estimated one million engines were in use across the delta, bolted to boats as outboard motors, rigged to water pumps and as part of portable milling equipment. Use of the engines quickly permeated the boundaries of "secure" areas and became key to the survival of guerilla bases and communication in liberated zones. This paper considers how wartime use of the machines transformed rural life in the delta and how the war's motor legacy dramatically altered the delta's agriculture and its water environment.