Sun, Mar 16, 2008 page18

• [BOOK REVIEW] 'Paris by Night' and the Vietnamese-American experience

  'Alien Encounters' leads the reader back to Edward Said's old assertion that the West's attitude to the East has always been characterized by fear and desire

  • By Bradley Winterton / CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
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  Vietnamese Americans arriving back in Vietnam, usually around the Tet (Lunar New Year) holiday, can present a disquieting spectacle. "They don't have the charm of the locals," said a Saigon friend of mine. "They've lost it somehow, I don't know why."

  Of course things may appear different to a Westerner than they look to a Vietnamese. But to me these returning migrants seem to patronize the locals in the cruelest and most brazen of ways. Maybe all people with new money look down on their former friends and family, but a crucial chapter in this new book from Duke University Press throws an interesting light on the phenomenon.

  But before I go into that, I want to say that it seems to me there may be a deeper reason for this cold, patronizing hauteur than the simple desire to display a new-found status. Because they've managed to leave Vietnam and acquire US residence, such people certainly know they're considered lucky - very lucky - back home. But at the same time, perhaps, it may just be that they aren't really happy in an adopted country in which only their children will ever feel truly at home. So they pretend all the more vigorously that they are happy, as well as relatively well-off and successful. Their swagger back in Vietnam has all the greater force because it comes from people trying to prove something that, if the truth were known, they themselves don't really believe.

  

  ALIEN ENCOUNTERS: POPULAR CULTURE IN ASIAN AMERICA

  Editors: Mimi Thi Nguyen and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu 365 pages Duke University Press

  This book is a collection of essays examining Asian American popular culture, from Chinese restaurants to Korean-American hip-hop. Its editors are two American professors of Vietnamese extraction (as the name they share, Nguyen - pronounced 'win', and the family name of the last Vietnamese emperors - immediately shows).

  The chapter that bears on my experience of the returning Vietnamese Americans looks at a particular set of variety shows, originally issued in France on video, called Paris by Night. These, now mostly circulated on DVD, are widely watched in Vietnam, where attempts to control them for political reasons have manifestly failed. Not that they any longer contain much of the anti-communist sentiment they had when they first appeared in the late 1970s. Today they're a blend of fashion show, song and dance, and MCs' commentary. They're probably the most popular cultural shows among the Vietnamese diaspora, largely concentrated in the US, Australia and France.

  What the chapter's author, Nhi T. Lieu, argues is that the seemingly endless series illustrates with some precision the concerns and psychological dilemmas as the American-Vietnamese community. The shows are now made in the US, incidentally, and a special edition in 1995, commemorating 20 years of migration and exile, was filmed in the prestigious Hollywood Shrine auditorium, the former location of the Oscar and Grammy award ceremonies.

  Many Vietnamese-Americans, Lieu points out, have moved from being refugees, even boat-people, to being bourgeois insiders, albeit ones not very well understood, or even fully accepted, by the mass of US citizens. These variety shows aim to bolster their new-found status, affirming such things as their ability to be fashion-conscious where once they only sought to acquire clothes to cover their bodies and keep warm.

  I was also lucky enough to interview a former boat-person recently. At the age of 14 he'd left Vietnam with his entire family bound, they thought, for Australia. They'd endured 10 days at sea along with some 200 others. Many were Catholics, and they'd all prayed to the Virgin Mary in the frequent spells of rough weather. They made landfall, not in Australia, but in Indonesia, where they went on to spend six years in a refugee camp before being flown back to Vietnam by an international relief agency. The cost per person for this protracted nightmare had been 20 gold rings.

  Alien Encounters, though mostly academic, contains a wide spectrum of writing. One chapter, about visiting 35 Chinese restaurants across Wisconsin, is positively chatty, using phrases like "freakin weird" and "wannabe blintz." The author was told that many migrants had arrived there from Fujian Province in recent years, though immigration to the US had become much more difficult since Sept. 11, so much so that there was still an imbalance between men and women, with Chinese men predominating just as they had in gold-mining California 100 and more years ago.

  This book's version of the Vietnamese-American experience is essentially positive because it concentrates, not on a sense of displacement and loss, but on adaptation to a new environment. The Paris by Night shows (with 'Paris' pronounced in the French, not the English, way) are popular in part because they incorporate so many American cultural styles. Members of the older generation, despite usually preferring to focus on the traditional culture they've left behind, enjoy them nevertheless because they show their communities as American, not alien. And their huge audiences back in Vietnam, a place that's these days pro-American in countless ways, like them as well for exactly the same reason.

  The view that Asian-Americans are both model minorities and at the same time incapable of complete assimilation, though contested, pervades all parts of this book. But there's a paradox involved, as Sunaina Maira points out in a vigorous essay on Indo-chic, looking at Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Tibetan immigrants in the New England town of Northampton. Things Asian can become fashionable exactly because they are different. This leads the reader back to Edward Said's old assertion that the West's attitude to the seemingly exotic East has always been characterized by a mixture, in almost equal proportions, of both fear and desire. Asians appear strangely "other," but also hugely desirable, thought our Victorian forebears. Not all that much, this book suggests, has really changed, in the US at least.
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