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International Initiative
Making American Studies in Vietnam
"The prospect of the Vietnamese losing the country to Americanization after having won the war against America is mind-boggling,” wrote a leading American Studies scholar to me in response to my news that I had just returned from a tour of teaching American Studies in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Yes, I worried about this myself, when I began teaching in Vietnam in 2000. As a boomer who had been one of Nixon’s “bums” back in the 1970s, I believed the only America Vietnam deserved was an absent one, or at least one with nothing but the postcolonial on its mind. America bombed Vietnam, napalmed it, and defoliated it; Vietnam brought America to its knees, and then got its name attached to a syndrome we still haven’t kicked. The idea that I might be complicit in attempting to re-colonize Vietnam with American culture appalled me – at the same time that the opportunity to assist in some measure of reconciliation was irresistible to me. Like most Americans I saw Vietnam mainly through the lens of the war – and, in my anxieties about “Americanization” as well as in my plans for what I believed to be a postcolonial American Studies respectful to the Vietnamese, I was not just a little condescending to them.
In a workshop in Vietnam that my Vietnamese colleagues and I organized in March, 2005, that was an important marker in the development of American Studies as a field of study in Vietnamese universities, one participant observed that the question is no longer whether American Studies in Vietnam, but what kind of American Studies. When I arrived in Vietnam at the beginning of my Fulbright appointment in 2000, the question for my colleagues at my host institution in Ho Chi Minh City, and indeed in all universities in Vietnam, was still whether American Studies. Relations between the United States and Vietnam had greatly improved since the normalization of relations began in 1995. Both were on the verge of signing a Bilateral Trade Agreement that many in Vietnam embraced with optimism. But American culture was still the culture of the enemy, or at best a problematic cultural ally, for many Vietnamese – at least for those in a position to make decisions about university curricula. And though the Fulbright Program has enormous prestige in Vietnam, and teachers – “professors” especially – are highly respected, I was of course still an American. Whatever studies I devised, it would need to be a carefully conceived American Studies—or none at all.
The group of students in the first classes my host institution organized for me were actually not from the university, but were a mixed group from just about every kind of background: ranging from students at other schools to doctors and joint venture employees, and in ages from a precocious 15-year-old high school student to a 71-year-old ex-pilot and doctor whose career had come to a censorious halt in 1975. I was assured that the group included at least one plainclothes representative of the local cultural police. This was my initiation course, one that drew “students” from a full range of backgrounds and political experiences and put them in a closely scrutinized classroom bell jar with me, and that merely met at the university rather than connected to it. My leading colleagues were Hanoians and included many whose experience with Americans on short tours of duty had often been conducted from the other side of a battle line; relations with the U.S. had been “normalized” yet only five years and this was only the second year for American Fulbrighters in Vietnam; I was teaching American Studies, not computer technics, sweet potato science, or even TESL; they wanted to keep an eye on me.
I had been sharply reminded as well by my colleagues back home about the perils of cultural colonialism—that I was even willing to accept a position in Vietnam teaching American Studies was to some of them akin to building a Nike factory to exploit cheap Vietnamese labor or positioning myself to open a Ho Chi Minh City Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. I too had been schooled in postcolonial theory and carried with me a politically upright set of anxieties. But the real world of teaching in Vietnam was something for which theory was little preparation, and concerns about “Americanization” withered in the face of my experience in the classroom and on the streets with my students. I embraced my host’s wariness with a tentativeness of my own. Vietnam had also been closed until recently to much of the kind of American culture that moves easily across borders. Though for better for worse American popular culture was now rushing Vietnam’s newly-opened doors, even the youngest students had little experience with the movies, music, and television programming, apart from Little House on the Prairie and Dallas reruns, that I might use as an easy springboard for teaching about American culture (though it was refreshing that they knew more about the American electoral college – in November, 2000 – than they did about Brittney Spears). I threw out what I brought with me, worked slowly, studied Vietnamese, and explored one topic and then another – just about everything with an “American” face was a potential topic of study—with my students to discover points of contact and understanding that might be the foundation of future courses in American Studies in Vietnam.
This initial experience in developing and teaching American Studies was framed by the death of a leading student in the class. In his late fiftites, Mr. Y was one of the older students in the group, and was one of the several English teachers who were not affiliated with a school or university but who supported themselves and their families by giving private lessons. He had come by his initial knowledge of English the hard way, from the Americans, and had paid the price of permanent marginalization for it – though the pay for giving English lessons on the margins was recently quite good. He often stopped after class to talk with me, and gave me some valuable advice about teaching on his home ground. Then he died while completing a paper assignment, which, alas, asked students to compare specific features of higher education in the United States and Vietnam. He had finished the paper, laid down for a nap, and had a heart attack. The doctors in my class explained to me that he had had high blood pressure and had not been taking his medication. This knowledge did not stop me from worrying all the more about just what kind of ground I thought I was standing on as a teacher in Vietnam—what more, in the city formerly known as Saigon.
In the following months we all became less hesitant and more confident – a colleague and gifted teacher whose father had been Vietnam’s first ambassador to Moscow after 1975 helped me organize a 12-week seminar series in American Studies in Ho Chi Minh City that drew 60 faculty from eleven universities. Our discussions in these seminars began with a point of contact that American scholars might recognize as “American Studies,” a review of the canon of socialist realist texts that had been taught in Vietnamese universities – by London, Hemingway, and Steinbeck. But we then ranged on from the Declaration of Independence (much admired by Ho Chi Minh) to Beloved, stopping along the way to talk about The Lone Ranger, Sherman Alexie, American divorce rates, W.E.B. DuBois and Edward Said. In a subsequent series of seminars I joined with a talented group of teachers to explore ideas about regionalism and postwar strategies for survival in Gone With the Wind and The Wind Done Gone ("There were a lot of Scarletts in Vietnam after 1975,” one of them explained to me about the popularity in Vietnam of GWTW in the 1980s.) In these and subsequent seminars and workshops my Vietnamese colleagues and I also pursued interests in American family life, the American Civil War, just why Mississippi fish farmers wanted to control the name “catfish,” the political economy of intellectual property rights, what Americans mean when they use the term “human rights,” the cultural meaning of money in America, and how a Vietnamese reader might understand the individualism in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. Some of these topics appeared in research papers in a regional conference we organized in Ho Chi Minh City in 2002 and in an international conference in Hanoi in 2003 that showcased Vietnamese research in American Studies.
Exchanges with students and colleagues outside the classroom, when we introduced them into what we did in the classroom, proved a good antidote to dogma or canonization. Discussions of “culture(s)” in general in the half-dozen classes and seminars I taught in Vietnam usually quickly diverged into two discussions – one that reflected official versions that were well-established within the classrooms of Vietnamese universities, the other from the sublime chaos of HCMC or Can Tho or Ha Noi streets and markets. In university classrooms, “culture” was high culture, and though For Whom the Bell Tolls was now joined by Beloved, it was still the best products of what had been produced by a group of people. On the streets, everything was negotiable and everything meant something, from Bill Clinton’s lucky ruddy complexion (and a Vietnamese lexicon of facial qualities as a window to character) to the weird kind of football that Americans hunker down for (and the more graceful kind that the rest of the world enjoys)—“culture” was the stories we told about it.
Generational differences added another dimension of complexity to our discussions. The faculty in my colloquia series who were old enough to have been seasoned by an experience with what the Vietnamese call the American War required an apology for the study of American culture before they could begin this study, and then made this apology the window through which they looked at America. Younger students were more direct in their interests – especially those of the older edge of the 60 percent of Vietnamese who had been born since 1975 and who were just then coming of age. Like young people everywhere they were absorbing whatever was around them, and were exposed to American popular culture, a more varied canon of American literature, a more inclusive and complicated version of American history, and even varieties of American English with which their elders had little experience. Hemingway met American Beauty, and frankly, he did not do too well in the exchange. Though they had a full respect for the sacrifices their elders had made and a keen awareness of themselves as Vietnamese, they were detached by age and circumstances from the crucible of war and nation-building that had forged the character of their parents. This meant that their “America” was also quite different from the one their parents had known.
Other Fulbrighters have engaged in efforts similar (and sometimes intersecting) with mine, a growing number of Vietnamese faculty and students have developed an interest in American Studies—and some of them have gone to American universities to do graduate study—and the critical mass of research and of courses devoted at least in part to American Studies that forty leading Vietnamese faculty and program directors sized up in our March 2005 workshop have continued to bloom. The first American Studies program officially recognized by the Ministry of Education and Training has been established in the International Programs Department of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Vietnam National University in Hanoi and is now training graduate students in American Studies. The leading universities in Vietnam have integrated some study of American culture into their English language programs, and many of them have also begun to offer expanded curriculum coverage of American literature and culture. Some Vietnamese university faculty have also engaged in important innovations in teaching American culture at the classroom level – where it matters most of all.
What has been crucial to all of these efforts, first of all, has been the commitment of those involved—and putting in the time. The incentives in American academe for short-term splash-downs in places outside the usual career circuit and then returning to the United States to theorize international American Studies are stronger than those for longer tours of cautious questioning in the streets. Certainly few can afford to take time out from the usual inbound trajectory of academic career tracks in the U.S. to devote a year or two to internationalizing American Studies from the streets up in a place outside the usual circuit. Bringing in prominent American scholars to give papers or a few lectures to Vietnamese teachers and scholars has bumped along the development of interests in American literature and history among those who have been lucky enough to attend these lectures. But these visiting scholars, perhaps shaped in their perceptions by the same historical experience with Vietnam that shaped mine before I arrived, may not be fully aware of the extent to which they have been managed by their hosts, or how their lectures have been orchestrated as political performances. While these performances were and continue to be important (crucial, even), at least in my experience in Vietnam, in catalyzing support for American Studies, they have had only an attenuated connection to teachers and students who are interested in teaching and learning about American culture. What is required to make this connection is time on the ground – whatever I was able to accomplish in Vietnam, it made a difference that I stayed for a fifteen-month Fulbright appointment, and have returned many times to continue working there.
In all, my postcolonial pals in the United States need not worry – my colleagues and students in Vietnam have not surrendered themselves to “Americanization,” but instead are doing with American Studies what the Vietnamese have done with outsider cultures for centuries: they are making it their own. At the same time, they have moved beyond their tragic encounter with the United States in a way that the average American, attuned to meeting Vietnam only in re-enactments of the memory of the war in political campaigns or in discussions of the current U.S. intervention in Iraq, can hardly imagine.
Making American Studies in Vietnam has been in the end much like the beginning – where we learned how to trust each other by simply playing it by ear – at times, yes, with a postcolonial theory ear trumpet, but still by ear. Just about everyone I have worked with in Vietnam, like Mr. Y, has been on one margin or another; all of us have moved across a complex landscape of differences to make conditional alliances – “little matrices,” one of my young Vietnamese colleagues calls them—about a Vietnamese American Studies.
My entire class attended Mr. Y’s funeral, by the way, after his daughter showed up at our classroom with the news about his death and with his paper for me to “mark.” When we arrived at his house I was ushered into a room—as teacher, I followed only the oldest student in the class—where his family had erected an altar for Buddha and one for the deceased. I lit incense, bowed at both altars, left Mr. Y’s paper amongst the marigolds below a large color photograph in a bright gold frame of a beaming Mr. Y, and then talked with his wife and children—while another family member filmed our exchange on a newly purchased camcorder. The family steered me back to Mr. Y’s altar for photographs of the “teacher” next to the “student,” while my other students remained out in the alley and made cracks about the deadly difficulty of my writing assignments. Here was the beginning as well as the end of my task as a teacher of cultures in Vietnam, standing at a border of “studies” that was entirely permeable and that moved each time I tried to define it, where something new was always emerging out of something deeply rooted in Vietnamese traditions. And where it was never clear who was student and who was teacher.
Mart Stewart is a professor of history at Western Washington University, and was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Ho Chi Minh City in 2000-2001, a Fulbright Senior Specialist in Hanoi in 2003, and has returned to Vietnam several times to direct workshops and lecture series in American Studies. An essay, “Teaching Gone With the Wind in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,” about one of the series of American Studies seminars he directed in Ho Chi Minh City, has recently been published in Southern Cultures.
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