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

Commemorating Migration through Pageantry

The rest of this essay seeks to provide a close reading of a commercially produced video recording of the eighteenth annual ao dai pageant held in Long Beach, California, in 1995. Entitled 20 Nam Chiec Ao Dai then Su, or "The Dislocation of the Ao Dai in Faraway Lands," this pageant commemorated the twenty-year anniversary of Vietnamese migration. Organized by college students and alumni of California State University, Long Beach, and sponsored primarily by Vietnamese American business elites of southern California, this ao dai beauty pageant featured a host of prominent Vietnamese American entertainers. The juxtaposition of the variety show and the beauty contest created a highly glamorized spectacle that encouraged community members to attend and contribute funds. What made this pageant unique was the extraordinary use of the ao dai to unearth feelings of nostalgia.

The commemorative ceremonies opened with a performance by Thai Thanh, a seasoned female performer who has entertained generations of Vietnamese. Standing on an elevated platform behind the contestants, she sang the classical Vietnamese operatic ballad "Hoi Trung Duong," a song about the three main rivers located in the northern, middle, and southern regions that geographically connect the nation of Vietnam. On stage dancing in front of the vocalist were twenty-one young female contestants, wearing three regional styles of dress that symbolically represented the three regions to which the song alludes. Physically, Thai Thanh embodies the maternal past. Revered and respected, she is an allegorical figure who narrates the national history of Vietnam for the future generation of Vietnamese Americans, represented by the contestants as well as younger members of the audience. For the older generation, she tells a familiar tale, conjuring up images of a unified "homeland" and using allegory to induce memory and nostalgia.24

In addition to joining three politically and culturally diverse regions into a unified Vietnam, the historical narrative in the song Hoi Trung Duong imagines a mythical homeland void of regional, religious, political, and linguistic differences. Preferring to recognize the unified historical Vietnam over the partitioned Vietnam of the Geneva Accords of 1954 and the current Socialist Republic of Vietnam, overseas Vietnamese envision and remember a harmonious nation before the war and before their subsequent displacement. Such nostalgic longings and politically salient representations of the Vietnamese past have become essential themes in Vietnamese American celebrations. Without these recurring images of a mythical and unified homeland, Vietnamese communities throughout the diaspora would not coalesce or attend cultural events such as the ao dai pageant. The pageants are thus produced for overseas communities to consume as well as to learn about new cultural practices of different local Vietnamese American communities.

The ao dai pageants construct a nostalgic nationalism and reaffirm Vietnamese identity. Vietnamese Americans also celebrate regionalism and their ability to accept and embrace historical and regional differences. The pageants work in a way that enables viewers to inhabit multiple subject positions: as members of the imagined nation, as distinct peoples from different regions, and as Vietnamese refugees who left their homeland and resettled elsewhere in the world. In the context of the 1995 Long Beach pageant, this was achieved through the wearing of the ao dai by the contestants; as the contestants danced in the opening act, wearing different regional ao dai, they created the illusion that it was possible to map the bodies and the identities of the young women directly on to the various regions of the Vietnamese nation.25 Though these efforts to create unity among the Vietnamese signified cooperation amid difference, they also revealed a desire to link diasporic Vietnamese globally. The metaphorical erasure and disavowal of regional and local distinctions, in essence, dramatized the organic wholeness of the "imagined community." Wherever in the world this ao dai beauty pageant video may have traveled, it created the space and spectacle for the Vietnamese in the diaspora to collectively imagine themselves as a united whole.