Organizer and Chair: Lorraine M. Paterson, Cornell University
Discussant: Tracy C. Barrett, Texas A & M at Commerce
The intellectual and artistic relationship between
China and Vietnam stands as one of the most engrossing, and contested, of the
last Asian century. This panel explores three new intellectual and artistic
angles on connections between shared metaphors of Chinese and Vietnamese historical
production. In exploring some of these joint metaphors used in three disparate
sites of intellectual and artistic production and memory, it draws upon aspects
of the shared literary/visual memorializing canon of both national contexts.
These three papers explore a use (or misuse) of shared literary allusion, narrative
and memorial in three disparate contexts. Kucera’s paper examines the memorials of Chinese and
Vietnamese sites of massacre in order to examine points of comparison and departure.
Yang’s paper on the heroic (Chinese) literary allusions of Ho Chi Minh
links to the Chinese literary writings of a Sino-Vietnamese exile explored in
Paterson’s paper. In examining these three contexts, the ways in which
Chinese and Vietnamese frames of memory and heroism are interrogated, used
and presented to national audiences are explored and elucidated.
Jane Parish Yang, Lawrence University
Although never incarcerated in French colonial prisons of his native Vietnam
as were other political activists against French rule, Ho Chi Minh spent
over a year in 1942-43 in a succession of Chinese prisons in Southwest China
on suspicion of being a Japanese spy. Drawing on his childhood schooling
in classical Chinese, Ho wrote a poetic diary in classical Chinese, which
turned a verse form associated with extolling natural beauty into a vehicle
of political protest. In this paper I examine in detail ten poems from his
Prison Diary [Nhat Ky Trong Tu] and argue that Ho, drawing on the Chinese
poetic canon, manipulated poetic form to construct his identity of resistance
to the oppressive prison environment. Ho’s
poetry exhibits incremental and wholesale borrowing from well-known poems,
comic reversal and self-reflexive humor. Above all the poems project an image
of dignity and resolution amidst prison squalor and deprivation, lending
him heroic stature previously missing from his political biography.
Karil J. Kucera, St. Olaf College
300 versus 300,000. Although the military massacres that took place at the
village of My Lai, Vietnam, in 1968 and the city of Nanjing, China, in 1937,
differ in magnitude, the impact of each atrocity on the local populations
cannot be deemed lesser or greater. Both populations took years to come to terms
with the events perpetrated upon them under the mantle of war; both sites now
encompass memorial structures dedicated to preserving the past as a means to
educate and edify those living in the present. Inside these memorial museums,
the story is told largely through the lens of the aggressor – a phenomenon that
allows the modern-day visitor the opportunity to be "present" at events
long past, bearing witness to tragedies over which they had and never will
have any control. In this paper, I will first explore the physicality of these
two sites, creating a framework within which to present the contents of each
museum site. Once contextualized, I will focus on the role of the photographic
medium as messenger for the past, and discuss how the museum organizers have
selectively utilized the medium in order to achieve the greatest transformative
impact on their audience. The final portion of the paper will present a critique
of the increasingly popular use of film and technology within the memorial museum
context, and the impact these types of museums are having on other sites within
Asia.
Lorraine M. Paterson, Cornell University
Events commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the battle of Dien Bien
Phu in 2004 were attended by various dignitaries connected to the Vietnamese
revolutionary past. Descendents of certainVietnamese political exiles, many
of whom had little knowledge of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, were invited
to participate.
Among such invitees were the descendents of Nguyen Van Cam, the messianic
child prodigy of late 19th century Tonkin whose early Chinese proficiency marked
him as a millenarian leader. A series of colonial exile degrees left him in
a remote area of French Polynesia; his descendents now living in the island
of Tahiti. Despite being only a quarter or an eighth Vietnamese, with little
knowledge of Vietnamese history or politics, five members of his family were
invited to participate in the celebrations at the invitation of the Vietnamese
government. In doing so they participated in their forefather being written
into a certain (revolutionary) historical narrative.
This paper examines what is at stake in bringing into
the public eye, a figure of such a varied and contested background. Nguyen
Van Cam’s own literary
output was in Chinese and French, his ability to merge into the Chinese communities – as
Chinese – within his places of exile, the greatest asset he possessed.
In this paper, I will examine how the figure of Nguyen Van Cam has been co-opted
in a revolutionary narrative of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and by drawing
on interviews conducted with his family members, discuss their experiences of
participating in the commemoration of Dien Bien Phu.
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