Remembering "the nation" through pageantry: Femininity and the politics of Vietnamese womanhood in the Hoa Hau Ao Dia contest

Frontiers, 2000 by Lieu, Nhi T

Ao dai beauty pageants are significant not only because they bridge symbols of the past with bodies that represent the future, but also because they work ideologically to evoke an "imagined community" that authenticates the persistence of Vietnamese ethnicity and carves out cultural roles for young Vietnamese women between the ages of eighteen to twenty-six."Ao dai beauty pageants have become ritualized events that dramatize major debates concerning nationalism, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and other issues Vietnamese Americans and other Vietnamese in the diaspora face. Indeed, they are crucial to the production of new, hybrid gender and ethnic identities. In fact, later, we will see another kind of hybrid beauty, one that is defined through plastic surgery and other postmodern technologies.

Cultural Politics and Imagining the Homeland

Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees fled their homeland after the Communist takeover of South Vietnam in 1975. Fearing for their lives and potential persecution from the new government, they left in successive waves with hopes of restarting elsewhere in the world where they would not be threatened. 12 Since 1975, Vietnamese refugees have resettled all over the globe including the United States, France, Australia, Canada, and other refugee-receiving nations. The current population of Vietnamese in diaspora has grown to nearly 1.5 million, and 593,213 of them live in the United States.'3 As exiled political refugees who lost their land to the Communists, the Vietnamese in diaspora remain vehemently opposed to the new regime in power. Despite the reopening in recent years of Vietnamese borders to commerce and tourism, some overseas Vietnamese refuse to return. This condition of exile has not only strengthened the spirit of nationalism among the overseas population, it has also made the collective memory of the former nation ever more meaningful. The creation of Vietnamese beauty pageants outside the Vietnamese nation, along with the nostalgia they invoke, has enabled the imagining of communities and fostered the growth of nationalism among exiled Vietnamese scattered throughout the diaspora.

Ao dai beauty pageants are not mere diasporic cultural productions created for the purposes of "cultural preservation." Held in large public auditoriums and civic centers, they also provide a forum for overseas Vietnamese to protest the racial politics of dominant American beauty pageants and challenge the limitations the Communist regime placed on cultural practice in Vietnam. When the Vietnamese refugees fled Vietnam, they never completely severed their ties with the existing nation of Vietnam. With relatives and sentimental memories remaining in Vietnam, the cultural politics between the exile communities are always in dialogue with that of the current nation. Moreover, because these communities are in exile, the imagined nation is both ambiguous and ambivalent in relation to the former nation and the new nation in which they have resettled. Since fleeing Vietnam, overseas Vietnamese have staged countless public protests to criticize what they deem as corrupt and inhumane conduct by the Communist government.14 At the same time, Vietnamese exiles throughout the world have also voiced their opinions on how the governments of the new nations they have settled in should relate to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Formerly barred from and presently reluctant to return physically to the homeland, Vietnamese exiles emotionally and metaphysically reconstruct, through cultural celebration and pageantry, the Vietnam they lost. Holding beauty pageants has become one of the most powerful ways for Vietnamese communities to publicly assert feelings of cultural nationalism as well as anti-Communism. Through the beauty pageants, the anti-Communist political voice of the imagined community of Vietnamese in exile is reaffirmed and the existence of communities in the United States and throughout the world is validated.