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Abstract
Memories of the Vietnam War abound in the minds of those who survived it, be they veterans or civilians, Vietnamese or American. Vietnamese refugees, forced to flee their homeland after the war ended in 1975, tell particularly poignant stories of loss—of country, of family, of tradition, and of identity. Not so the women featured in this article. During the war, they served as bargirls in Saigon, entertaining American soldiers. The stories they tell of the war paint an entirely different picture: one of good times, and camaraderie, and the exhilaration of being young and free in the city. They were able to break free from tradition and the expectations imposed on their gender because of the war, and because of that, remember the war as the best time of their lives.
Notes
1 Barbara Myerhoff, Remembered Lives: The Work of Ritual, Storytelling and Growing Older (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 231.
2 “Other” is a term used in anthropology to refer to any group of people considered to be an outgroup (foreign, strange, not one of us) to another group being referenced. Americans would be the Other to Vietnamese; Vietnamese the Other to Americans.
3 I am indebted to Syracuse University, which funded my master's research back in 1994. Most recently, Christopher Newport University awarded me a Dean's Office Summer Grant in 2007 to do further research and a Faculty Development Grant to work on this article in 2010. I am profoundly grateful to Christopher Newport University for assisting me in continuing this long-term study.
4 In the U.S., I have been working within Vietnamese refugee communities since 1994. In Vietnam, I conducted doctoral research in Hanoi with war survivors who are now plagued with war ghost-induced illness. For more on the latter, see Mai Lan Gustafsson, War and Shadows: The Haunting of Vietnam (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009).
5 For many years, my parents maintained the myth that they had met in a sewing shop. It was only after I entered college that my mother admitted that she had in fact been working as a bargirl.
6 Memorable works include Mark Baker, Nam: The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women Who Fought There (New York: Morrow, 1981); Harry Maurer, Strange Ground: Americans in Vietnam 1945-1975, An Oral History (New York: Henry Holt, 1989); Al Santoli, Everything We Had: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by 33 American Soldiers Who Fought It (New York: Ballantine Books, 1982); and Wallace Terry, ed., Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veteran (New York: Random House, 1984).
7 See John Kleinen, Facing the Future, Reviving the Past: A Study of Social Change in a Northern Vietnamese Village (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1999); Hy Van Luong, Revolution in the Village: Tradition and Transformation in North Vietnam, 1925-1988 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992); and Nhu Truong Tang, A Viet Cong Memoir: An Inside Account of the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath (New York: Vintage Books, 1985).
8 See Kathryn Marshall, In the Combat Zone: An Oral History of American Women in Vietnam, 1966-1975 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987); Sandra C. Taylor, Vietnamese Women at War: Fighting for Ho Chi Minh and the Revolution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999); Karen Gottschang Turner, Even the Women Must Fight: Memories of War from North Vietnam (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998); and Keith Walker, A Piece of My Heart: The Stories of 26 American Women Who Served in Vietnam (New York: Ballantine Books, 1985).
9 See Pamela A. DeVoe, “Refugee Work and Health in Mid-America,” in Selected Papers on Refugee Issues, ed. Pamela A. DeVoe, 112 (Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association, 1992).
10 I interviewed these women in Vietnamese communities located in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.
11 Hai, first contact with author, Boston area, July 10, 1994.
12 I have written the words of my informants as they said them to me. All thirty-two women speak English, and while I can also speak Vietnamese, they spoke English—with their individual accents—to me almost exclusively.
13 Hai, interview with the author, Boston area, July 10, 1994.
14 Mr., Mrs., and Grandmother Nguyen, interview with the author, Boston area, July 12, 1994.
15 Hai, interview with the author, Boston area, July 18, 1994.
16 Population figures are for the years 2007/09, taken from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey, “Population Group: Vietnamese Alone. Data Set: 2007–2009 American Community Survey 3-Year Estimates.” American Community Survey available on the U.S. Census Bureau’s website at http://factfinder.census.gov/home/saff/main.html?_lang=en (accessed June 29, 2011).
17 In addition, they have requested that I keep their recorded interviews to myself until five years after their deaths, after which they have signed permission forms for me to archive them. Even after death, to protect their families, they want their identities to remain confidential.
18 Cao, like the rest of the women in this study, know how many others are involved. Many now know each personally as a result of this project.
19 Cao, interview with the author, central New Jersey, June 10, 2007.
20 Ibid.
21 John Tenhula, Voices from Southeast Asia: The Refugee Experience in the United States (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1991), 13.
22 Maurer, Strange Ground, 466.
23 USMACV was in charge of all U.S. military forces in Vietnam, and its mission was to assist the Republic of Vietnam's armed forces in resisting external aggression.
24 Neil L. Jamieson, Understanding Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 333.
25 Thanh, interview with the author, Boston area, July 12, 2007.
26 Thu Loan, interview with the author, northern Virginia, July 27, 2007.
27 Trac, interview with the author, upstate New York, August 29, 1994.
28 Bich Van Pham, The Vietnamese Family in Change: The Case of the Red River Delta (Surrey: Curzon Press, 1999), 13.
29 Cao, interview with the author, central New Jersey, August 2, 1994.
30 Tran, interview with the author, upstate New York, March 14, 1995.
31 Shaun Kingsley Malarney, “‘The Fatherland Remembers Your Sacrifice’: Commemorating War Dead in North Vietnam,” in The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam, ed. Hue-Tam Ho Tai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 71.
32 Binh Minh, interview with the author, upstate New York, July 30, 2000.
33 Chi, interview with the author, central New Jersey, December 22, 1994.
34 Chi, same interview with the author.
35 Pham, The Vietnamese Family in Change, 20.
36 Huong Lien Nghiem, “Female Garment Workers: The New Young Volunteers in Vietnam's Modernization,” in Social Inequality in Vietnam and the Challenges to Reform, ed. Philip Taylor (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2004), 297.
37 Hy Van Luong, “Vietnamese Kinship: Structural Principles and the Socialist Transformation in Northern Vietnam,” Journal of Asian Studies, 48, no. 4 (1989): 749.
38 Hiep, interview with the author, Boston area, August 1, 1994.
39 Lieu, interview with the author, upstate New York, February 10, 2002.
40 Kham Khac Nguyen, An Introduction to Vietnamese Culture (Tokyo: The Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1967), 66.
41 Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 92.
42 Hai, interview with the author, Boston area, August 29, 1996.
43 Nga, interview with the author, upstate New York, June 6, 2007.
44 Linh, interview with the author, central New Jersey, December 23, 1994.
45 Hai, interview with the author, Boston area, August 1, 1994.
46 Trac, interview with the author, upstate New York, September 4, 1994.
47 Tuyet, interview with the author, upstate New York, August 28, 1994.
48 Quy, interview with the author, central New Jersey, August 3, 1994.
49 Kim Oanh, interview with the author, Boston area, July, 25, 1994.
50 Tran, interview with the author, upstate New York, March 14, 1995.
51 Thom, interview with the author, Boston area, July 26, 1994.
52 Hiep, interview with the author, Boston area, July 30, 1994.
53 Hai, interview with the author, Boston area, July 10, 2007.
54 They each moved from their home villages to the city between 1967 and 1970.
55 Except for Cao, who was 35 years at the time. An “old maid” in the village because Cao became a much sought-after companion at the American bars. The very traits that had made her unmarriageable—being bawdy and always speaking her mind—were appreciated by lonely American soldiers in Saigon.
56 Maurer, Strange Ground, 466.
57 Binh Minh, interview with the author, upstate New York, September 11, 1994.
58 Khoa, interview with the author, upstate New York, January 3, 2001.
59 Hai, interview with the author, Boston area, July 12, 2007.
60 Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974).
61 Diep, interview with the author, northern Virginia, July 28, 2007.
62 Miriam Lee Kaprow, “Celebrating Impermanence: Gypsies in a Spanish City,” in The Naked Anthropologist: Tales from Around the World, ed. Philip R. DeVita (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1992), 219.
63 Kim Oanh, interview with the author, Boston area, July 22, 1994.
64 Lieu, interview with the author, upstate New York, September 4, 1994.
65 Tran, interview with the author, upstate New York, March 13, 1995.
66 Trinh, interview with the author, central New Jersey, August 2, 1994.
67 Tuyet, interview with the author, upstate New York, August 30, 1994.
68 Huong, interview with the author, central New Jersey, August 5, 1994.
69 Thu Loan, interview with the author, central New Jersey, December 23, 1994.
70 Thanh, interview with the author, Boston area, July 17, 1994.
71 Thom, interview with the author, Boston area, November 17, 1994.
72 Tuyet, interview with the author, upstate New York, September 1, 1994.
73 American soldiers were discouraged by the U.S. military from marrying Vietnamese women.
74 Shandon Phan, “Vietnamese Amerasians in America,” http://www.asian-nation.org/amerasians.shtml (accessed January 1, 2011).
75 See Steven DeBonis, Children of the Enemy: Oral Histories of Vietnamese Amerasians and Their Mothers (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1994); Robert McKelvey, The Dust of Life: America's Children Abandoned in Vietnam (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000); and Trin Yarborough, Surviving Twice: Amerasian Children of the Vietnam War (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2005).
76 Lesleyanne Hawthorne, Refugee: The Vietnamese Experience (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1982), 160, 216.
77 Paul James Rutledge, The Vietnamese Experience in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1992), 63.
78 Huong, interview with the author, central New Jersey, June 13, 2007.
79 Khoa, interview with the author, upstate New York, August 3, 2004.
80 Binh Minh, interview with the author, upstate New York, June 30, 2007.
81 I have presented on their nontraditionalism, most notably at the New York Conference on Asian Studies, Hamilton College (Mai Lan Gustafsson, “The Price of Heaven: Fallen Women and the Buying of Morality,” September 2008) and on the radio program “With Good Reason: Virginia's Only Statewide Public Radio Program” (April 25, 2009).
82 Hai, interview with the author, Boston area, July 10, 2007.
83 Lieu, interview with the author, upstate New York, July 1, 2007.
84 Hai, interview with the author, Boston area, July 12, 2007.
85 My being Amerasian was the entrée into these women's lives, and their caring for me as a surrogate or proxy for their own children sustains our friendships. In Vietnam, that people identified me as ill—like them—opened doors that might otherwise have stayed closed. See Mai Lan Gustafsson, War and Shadows: The Haunting of Vietnam (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009) for more on this bonding through suffering.
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Mai Lan Gustafsson
Mai Lan Gustafsson is an assistant professor of anthropology at Christopher Newport University in Virginia, where she teaches courses on magic and religion, refugees, evolution, gender, and cultural anthropology. She did doctoral fieldwork in Vietnam and continues her work with Vietnamese refugees in the U.S. Gustafsson worked previously as the director of a nonprofit organization serving Southeast Asian refugees in upstate New York