14

“She's the Real Thing”

Filming the Nostalgic Past through Vietnamese Women

Diem-My T. Bui

In director Brian de Palma's film Casualties of War (1989), Private Eriksson, played by Michael J. Fox, spots an Asian woman on a bus and flashes back to his service in the Vietnam War. There begins his story of the rape, torture, and murder of a Vietnamese girl taken hostage during a raid of a suspected Vietcong village. The girl is central to the transformation Eriksson undergoes in his struggle for justice for the girl. It is from his viewpoint that the story of the casualties and horrors of war is told and experienced. In remembering the war, Hollywood “remembers” his story or stories like his through films on the war. Thus, knowledge about the experience of war and about Vietnam is limited to these mainstream Hollywood stories. Moreover, Vietnamese women are relegated to supporting roles in their own war in most of these films. What happens when their characters speak in film? What do we learn of them, of the war, and of the country that was divided into two nations?

This chapter examines representations of Vietnamese women in three US-produced films in the Vietnam War film genre. In these three films, Heaven and Earth (1993), The Quiet American (2002), and Three Seasons (1999), Vietnamese or Vietnamese American actresses are central characters. All three films were released in the post-revisionist era on the war that sought to reenact the war by establishing the Vietnam War veteran as hypermasculine and revenge-seeking. The films examined in this chapter focus on different moments of the war, including before and after the war. By considering the discursive construction of the films, including how the actresses participate or are represented in them, I explore variations on Trinh T. Minh-ha's (1991) question on the Other: Who speaks? What speaks? How does the speaker establish knowledge about Vietnamese women when “speaking about” a story?

Collective Memory-Making in Films on Vietnam

Darrell Hamamoto (1994) refers to the traumatic experience of the US failure in Vietnam as “the Vietnam Syndrome,” which describes the national citizenry's crisis of confidence that challenged the political and military will of the United States. This crisis of confidence followed from President John F. Kennedy's declaration of the United States as the model nation of democracy and the Free World. The contradiction between its declaration as global role model and the failure of the United States to police the spread of global communism forced US citizens to rethink their leadership position in the global arena. The Vietnam Syndrome inspired the US launching of the Gulf War as a resolution to its perceived loss of stature. Moreover, this syndrome affected media production on remembering the war. To compensate for this crisis, the Vietnam War was reenacted through Hollywood films and replayed and reworked as the US collective remembrance of the war.

In their reworking of the war, Hollywood films produced archetypal characters who dealt with major issues of the syndrome: the crisis in masculinity, in national identity, and in politics. Jeffords (1989) finds that these representations are emblems for what she terms the “remasculinization” of US culture following the war. The characteristics that are deemed important in reaching male adulthood are reaffirmed in Vietnam representation through such films as The Deer Hunter (1979), Missing in Action (1984), and Rambo: First Blood, Part II (1985). Because the war in Vietnam was considered a failure, the films focused less on the war's outcome and more on the way the war was fought (Jeffords, 1989). Yvonne Tasker (1993) echoes the point that national identity is as important as masculinity in war films, particularly in the constructions of race. Vietnamese became the representations of Orientals through their invisibility, and Black Americans were the marginal representations of the literally disproportionate number of Black casualties compared to White casualties. The presence of Vietnamese characters in the films was felt, but their subjectivities were rarely developed, and only in relation to the US characters' narratives. Such invisible representations allow for reworking the memory of the war, since the US soldiers and their narratives are foregrounded or given prominence in the films. This focus on US soldiers reduces the Vietnamese to minor roles in their own civil war.

John Storey (2003) calls this fantasy revisionist narrative a Hollywood-produced “regime of truth.” Vietnam War films helped to construct a memory of the war and a desire to win the war. Storey cautions, however, that productions of these meanings in the films do not necessarily mean that they were consumed by audiences without question. Rather, in order for these films to be invested in by studios, the meanings had to resonate with US audiences at a period in time when re-remembering the war in all its trauma was central for catharsis from the Vietnam Syndrome. Marita Sturken (1997) examines the power of photographic images in this memory-making and argues that they offer and create compelling versions and meanings of history. The production of meaning partly involves the process of forgetting and remembering as constitutive healing. Film is one way to achieve catharsis through collective forgetting and remembering. One such film is Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986). Albert Auster and Leonard Quart (1993) contend Platoon was a cathartic film that sought to escape from the Vietnam Syndrome that had plagued the nation since the end of the war. John Wheeler, president of the Center for the Study of the Vietnam Generation and chairman of the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial Fund, said: “The Vietnam memorial was one gate our country had to pass through. Platoon is another; it is part of the healing process” (Auster & Quart, 1993, p. 131).

Thomas Patrick Doherty (1993) characterizes the scholarship on gender in cinematic representations of Vietnam as in need of analysis on women. The search to examine women in Vietnam War films has been narrowly defined as US women, while the representations of Vietnamese women have been overlooked. Since film engages with our history and becomes a significant part of narrative writing on history and national identity, examining films where Vietnamese actresses play major roles allows us to see how their characters' narratives are articulated within the rewriting of history through cinematic representation.

Orientalist Logic

Trinh T. Minh-ha (1991) suggests that until we transform our society of the male-centered spectacle, we will continue to neglect the sexual oppression of women.Thus, if we examine the spectacle of Vietnamese women in Vietnam War films, we could say that Vietnamese women will always be understood within the Orientalist logic that purports to “own” them through cinematic knowledge production. Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) examines the relationship between dichotomous constructs, the West and the East, and how the discourse of Orientalism creates and maintains that relationship. Orientalism, Said argues, is produced through uneven exchanges with varying degrees of power (intellectual, political, moral, and cultural) and operates within a binary logic of West and East. In the spectacle of the Other, representation and the circulation of its meaning are dependent on the exercise of symbolic power. Vietnam War film discourse that continues to produce narratives in which Vietnamese women play marginal roles in their own war contributes to the discourse on the women as sexualized beings whose only functions are sex and death. Vietnam War films restage the war and, thus, gender representation. It is this restaging of gender in Vietnam War films, and how Vietnamese female subjectivities get rewritten and articulated in history, that is the focus of my concern.

David Desser (1991) shows us that in Vietnam War films the absence of the enemy is also an image, because it imagines the North Vietnamese enemy as a sickness within US society. The enemy is a monolithic Oriental such that images of the South Vietnamese are also images of the enemy, blurring the lines between communist and nationalist Vietnamese. Further, Desser maintains that images of Vietcong female fighters, such as in Apocalypse Now (1979) and Full Metal Jacket (1987), “feminize” the enemy so that we come to associate the enemy with the figure of a woman. Therefore, the woman-as-enemy is a major undercurrent in the United States' attitudes toward the Vietnamese, suggesting the prevalence of racialized and sexualized bodies in Vietnam War films. Desser concludes that “even the retrospective dramatic analyses of the Vietnam War focus on us, on what the war did to us, on how we entered Vietnam with either good or bad intentions, but never on Vietnam as a historical site, never on the Vietnamese as genuine subjects, as people with a culture, a heritage, a political agenda, even a cultural and political confusion all their own” (1991, p. 97).

Desser's analysis of Vietnamese subjectivity returns us to Trinh's question on who speaks and what speaks. The films that confront the experiences of those in the war were a way for people to deal with the trauma of a war that seemed to have no cohesive logic, because it produced fractured identities, both personal and national. John Newsinger's study (1993) on masculinity in some Vietnam War films shows that White heterosexual male soldiers' narratives are symbolically communicated through such memorable scenes as those in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, where soldiers surf while under fire, Playboy playmates perform to the soldiers in the jungle, and the Air Cavalry behaves with Western-style heroics. By speaking through these narratives, the films demonstrate their mastery or knowledge of the Vietnamese as Orientals who operate in sexual service and as body counts. Milton J. Bates (1990) argues that when films such as Coming Home (1978), The Deer Hunter (1978), and Apocalypse Now were released, they helped the general public and war veterans confront the Vietnam experience and trauma. Characters of Vietnamese women, even when marginal, are important in this confrontation.

In the cinematic confrontation and reflection of the war, Heaven and Earth, The Quiet American, and Three Seasons attempt to take a different approach from previous Vietnam War films by offering alternative narratives to the White heterosexual male GI. Heaven and Earth centers its story around the autobiography of a Vietnamese woman who settled in the United States. The Quiet American reflects on the cause of the war through the eyes of an aging British journalist. Finally, Three Seasons takes a multilayered approach by narrating several different viewpoints: a Vietnamese female prostitute, a Vietnamese male cyclo driver, a young Vietnamese youth, a Vietnamese lotus picker, and a US Vietnam War veteran. The one narrative common to the three films is that of the Vietnamese woman whose sexuality becomes a product of the war. Indeed, Vietnamese women as lovers, prostitutes, and wives to US GIs were acknowledged in the media as consequences of the United States' involvement in the war. Furthermore, all three of these films abide by the myth of discovery in which the women are found to be connections to an idealized past. This myth of discovery is used by the filmmakers either in media discussions on the films or in the films themselves. Although cinematic retellings of the war could include stories of these women at its center, these stories are relegated to marginal positions. When they are told, they are shallow representations cast in images of pleasure and desire (for heterosexual US men). The Vietnam War film genre depends heavily on the trope of the Southeast Asian prostitute in constructing a narrative that explores the fractured masculine identity.

The trope of the Southeast Asian prostitute is rooted in the long history of Asian women serving as lovers for Western males, both in fiction and in reality. US involvement in Asian conflicts had set the conditions that made possible sexual encounters between Asian women and US soldiers in prostitution and in marriage. In Hollywood cinema, the Southeast Asian prostitute is an exoticized and eroticized figure. Her function as a sexual being for Western males is most essential to the narratives, because her character establishes the line between masculinity and femininity (Jeffords, 1989). Whether the prostitute is a sex worker in a night club or a girlfriend considered a body for sexual use and abandonment, the consequence of this trope in films is that the prostitute's situation frequently ends in violence (death or abuse) or a dead end (she remains a prostitute). She is positioned as the disposable feminine Other in contrast to the masculine White Westerner with whom the film offers the spectator identification. The sexual experiences of the main female characters echo the elements of this trope but the women end up either transcending their situation or being resigned to it. Moreover, press coverage of the films often reenacted elements of this trope through gendered representation of the actresses.

Dramatizing a Vietnamese Woman's Story: Oliver Stone's Vision of Heaven and Earth

Oliver Stone's cinematic adaptation of Le Ly Hayslip's autobiographies, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places and Child of War, Woman of Peace, is his third film in a trilogy on the Vietnam War, following Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July (1989). Heaven and Earth was released domestically in December 1993 and made just less than $6 million. In an interview, Stone made clear that the film was his attempt to present a lesser-known narrative about the Vietnam War when he stated that Hayslip's story was “a different side of the war for Americans. Here was a story of a way of life that none of us knew or cared about when we were in Vietnam” (Hoover, 1994, p. B1). In his previous films, Stone drew on his personal experiences as a GI during the Vietnam War to represent a realist perspective and fractured masculinity on the big screen. Heaven and Earth was not simply about representing a “different side of the war” but also about supplementing Stone's own struggle to understand the war: “Making Heaven and Earth rounded out my own experience in Vietnam [...] It's the story of the villagers and that's the story that we American soldiers didn't understand” (Hoover, 1994, p. B1). Stone consulted with Hayslip to write the screenplay and direct the film. He credits her participation in the creation of the film to his increased understanding of the Vietnamese and their philosophical views: “Thanks to Le Ly, I came to understand the Vietnamese people and their close connection to their ancestors and their land” (Hoover, 1994, p. B1).

The film centers on Vietnamese Hayslip, played by first-time Vietnamese American actress Hiep Thi Le. Its opening shots show Hayslip's home village, Ky La in central Vietnam, depicted as an idyllic place prior to the French colonization of Vietnam. Le's character narrates her journey from Vietnam, just before the start of the Vietnam War, to the United States after the war, and finally back to Vietnam. Along the way, Le is tortured and raped by soldiers, impregnated by her employer, and eventually married to a US soldier played by Tommy Lee Jones, who takes her to the United States. The epilogue of the film finds Hayslip years later as a successful business woman who, for the first time since leaving, returns to Vietnam with her sons. Back in Ky La, she meets a villager who tells her that “rebuilding a nation after war is like trying to start a family by getting raped!”

Stone's understanding of Vietnam and the Vietnamese leans toward romanticizing a Vietnam prior to the communist takeover and to the US intervention in the war. Mariam Beevi (1997) argues that Stone, and Hayslip through her texts, stages the “Vietnamese American experience” in which two cultures, “Western” and “Eastern,” are seen as mutually exclusive in moral and religious beliefs. The film's opening sequence suggests a heavenly place where fields are lush and green, families are intact, and Buddhism and peace govern the people. It is the village of Ky La where Hayslip spent her early childhood years happily with her family. In order to portray the nostalgia for village life, Stone sent his actors to Ky La, where they learned about living in this traditional farming village. In his staging of Hayslip's story, Stone creates an archetype of a Vietnamese American woman who “has to overcome anger, ambition and particularly, sexual promiscuity epitomized by prostitution; she must purge herself of these ‘Western’ influences and regain her ‘Eastern spirituality,’ in turn redeeming her ‘nationality’” (Beevi, 1997, pp. 43–44). Like the US Vietnam War films that represent a masculinity fractured by the experience of war, Beevi asserts that Heaven and Earth presents a fractured femininity that can be healed through Hayslip's transformation as a “new international immigrant woman” who recaptures her spiritual and ancestral traditions. Further, by presenting Hayslip's story as a return to “home,” Stone rewrites the narrative of nation-building on her body through her loyalty to her US husband (even as she divorces him) and to her children.

Hayslip's body is central to the story she tells as a refugee woman, because the body is where issues of nationalism and national conflict are inscribed. Whereas Beevi suggests that Hayslip's body is the instrument to show the return to familial duty as nation-building, Leslie Bow (1994) argues that Hayslip's feminine sexuality is the conduit through which national conflicts are defined. Bow claims that Hayslip's political allegiance is established in the commodification of her sexuality. Viet Nguyen (1997, 2002) concurs that Hayslip's body is necessary in the narrative of the refugee for the United States to come to terms with this immigrant population. For Nguyen, representation of Hayslip's body as a victimized one makes it possible for US audiences and readers to understand Hayslip's experience more fully. These scholars point out that the focus on corporeality is a narrative device in the telling of Hayslip's story of the refugee for Stone's audience.

Other Vietnamese women in Hayslip's story are just as central to telling the refugee experience through the body. Their characters in the film also contribute to the construction of Hayslip's gendered body. Hayslip's mother, Mama, is a constant reminder of her duty to the family and of the importance of chastity. Mama shows little warmth toward her daughter, but offers Hayslip her approval at the end of the film by saying that Le Ly has completed her circle of growth and that Mama's destiny as her mother is over. Kim, Hayslip's sister, is the wayward Vietnamese woman commodifying her body in a brothel for US GIs during the war. She later marries a physically abusive GI and moves with him to the United States. Madame Lien is the heartless wife of Le Ly's employer, the Master, who orders Le Ly to be sent out of the house for being impregnated by him. These three female characters – Mama, Kim, and Madame – are the various paths of womanhood and help to construct Hayslip's body as a site for the negotiation of national identity. In other words, they represent what Hayslip has either chosen not to become or not been allowed to become as a Vietnamese woman. They are the boundaries of her womanhood by instructing Hayslip on her virtue and her duty as a woman and mother. In this sense, Vietnamese womanhood is constructed through the several female characters in the film who are each suffering victims in their own way. Judith Butler (1993) asserts that it is this reiterative discourse that makes, regulates, and constrains sexuality. Hayslip is defined against the repudiation of the three supporting Vietnamese female characters. That is, these women are excluded from the redemption Hayslip receives in the end because they are resigned in their suffering, unlike Hayslip, who is portrayed as the courageous immigrant woman who works her way out of her situation. Hayslip is not constructed in isolation but, rather, in what Butler maintains is a performance of multiple articulations of norms or set of norms. A normative heterosexuality is established through this performance. Hayslip's numerous affairs with men, both in the book and in the film, help to construct Vietnamese womanhood as a necessary return to familial duty and virtue. The story that Stone offers his audience is part of a discourse of normativities that collectively produce an immigrant woman's narrative of struggle and redemption. The immigrant/refugee narrative is one about individuals who work hard to achieve success – the myth of the model minority. Moreover, this type of narrative suggests that immigrants are able to access an authentic past described in Stone's film as a prewar, pre-border crossing, and an agrarian-based life.

Also central to understanding the narrative of the film is press coverage about the film. The refugee narrative is used to describe actress Hiep Thi Le's connection to the story. A LexisNexis keyword search on Le produced only a few articles, which described her as a new actress. Some of the newspaper coverage addressed Le's personal experience as an immigrant:

Stone seems to have discovered the unspoiled Vietnamese woman in casting Le, who appears to be Stone's authentic representation of a Vietnamese woman untainted by the consequences of war and Western influence. It is also through the immigrant narrative that this discovery is structured. For instance, the Chicago Sun-Times published an article solely on Le and how the film was something to which she could relate: “The story hit home for Hiep, who was one of Vietnam's boat people” (Pearlman, 1994, p. 2NC). Le is seldom presented as an actress based on her merit, but rather as an actress who had to draw on her similar experience as a Vietnamese refugee to play the part. Paralleling the film, the narrative in these articles also focuses on the individual, where the context of family, friends, and historical events is neglected in the retelling. It is similar to the “pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps” notion that is part of the myth of the model minority of Asian Americans in which the media depict Asians in the United States as being ideal racial minorities who became successful as a result of individual will and determination. In the media surrounding the film's lead actress, Le is depicted within the immigrant/refugee narrative like the lead character, Hayslip, without venturing beyond a story about her hard work to achieve her US success. It is her “unspoiled” exposure to Hollywood and her experience, her authenticity, as a boat person that the media and Stone declared to be relevant to the film. In framing the actress as a discovery, Stone takes credit for finding the actress and giving her the opportunity to showcase her communication of her refugee experience.

Stone brought to mainstream audiences in the 1990s a Vietnamese woman's story that is translated to audiences into a refugee success story and a gendered national identity. Further, the Vietnamese American actress who plays this woman in the film is also made to fit into this same story. Hayslip's sexuality is defined through the film's management of the other Vietnamese female characters' sexuality in the film. For instance, Hayslip does not sell her body like her sister, even when offered a large amount of money. By not commodifying her body to the GIs, Hayslip may recoup her compromised sexuality. As with the overplayed trope of the Southeast Asian prostitute, Hayslip underwent similar experiences of rape, affairs with White men, and having their children. However, Hayslip ends as a success story and offers a reconciliation of past conflicts between the United States and Vietnam and between old and new Vietnam. Both Hayslip and Hiep Thi Le's stories have been commodified as selling points in Stone's vision of the Vietnam War and its aftermath. Hayslip's identity as a refugee has been bounded and regulated by the sexualities of the women in her story and the story that Stone rewrites for the screen.

Around the time this film was released in late 1993, Vietnam was reemerging in the news as the United States began to lighten up on its previously rigid stance of no reconciliation with Vietnam imposed shortly after the end of the war. Matthew Killmeier and Gloria Kwok (2005) maintain that because Stone's film was released during a time of reconciliation between the two nations, the film contributes to “the American recuperation of Vietnam as an object of neoliberal imperialism” (p. 269). That is, as the United States normalizes its relations with Vietnam through renewals of trade and tourism, the success story of Le Ly Hayslip reads as part of the cultural incorporation of Vietnam in the United States' neoliberal empire. Discourse on Vietnam in the 1990s described the country as a more accessible place after the war. The refugee narrative and the trope of the Southeast Asian prostitute in Heaven and Earth aid in representing Vietnam and Vietnamese women as part of this renewed accessibility and the reenactment of a transnational mobility success story.

Oliver Stone adapted Heaven and Earth during a significant shift in Vietnam–US relations in which the two countries began a reconciliation of the past. Also during this time, Vietnamese Americans were a new addition to the model minority myth through the immigrant/refugee narrative. This narrative was echoed in the casting of the lead actress and the press coverage of her own life story. Reconciliation in the 1990s and in the film referred not only to the resolving of conflicts between Vietnam and the United States, but also to reconciling Vietnam's present with Stone's vision of an authentic, mythical old Vietnam. The refugee success story, in conjunction with the trope of the Southeast Asian prostitute, constructs Vietnamese women as available for discovery by the West, which just has to search for the “unspoilt” Vietnamese woman. The trope polices the sexuality of Vietnamese women by framing it as a woman's choice to commodify her body and contrasting it against the choices of the other female characters. National identity and authenticity are inscribed on women's bodies and heralded as the paths toward immigrant success.

The Quiet American: Phillip Noyce's Critique of War

The 2002 cinematic interpretation of Graham Greene's 1955 novel The Quiet American is, on the surface, a film about the political and personal influences of a journalist's coverage of the beginnings of a war. Media discussion of the film placed it as a timely critique on US foreign policies following the 9/11 attacks on the United States. However, contextualizing the film within the history of Vietnam films by the United States and within the framework of a gendered Western gaze offers a different reading. In its fictionalized story of reporting the events leading up to the United States' Vietnam War, the film uses romance as a narrative device to communicate knowledge about Vietnamese women to the US viewing audience.

Three decades after the end of the Vietnam War, cinema continues to contribute to the ongoing moral, political, and social debates surrounding the United States' involvement in that war. US films on Vietnam overwhelmingly are about the experiences of US soldiers in the war (for partial bibliographies of these films, refer to Dittmar & Michaud, 1990; Whillock, 1990). More than depictions of history, these films represent current attitudes about the war such that they create a sense that this war has never ended (Anderegg, 1991). The filmmakers of The Quiet American acknowledge their film's participation in US understandings about its role in the Vietnam War. Director Phillip Noyce, in explaining his reasoning for adapting the book into a film, comments that it was “the great Vietnam War movie that hadn't been made. A film not about the experiences of fighting the American war against the Vietnamese, but a film that explains why the fighting occurred, why the Americans prosecuted that war over such a long period with such vehemence” (Bffc.net, 2002). Furthermore, the filmmakers suggest that the film has relevance to policies about war in general and is a caution against jumping into war. This film, read within contemporary political events, indicates recent public sentiment about the United States as a meddler in world affairs and connects the Vietnam War to the Second Gulf War. In an interview, Noyce made this connection in his comment on the character of Pyle, saying “George [W.] Bush is the ultimate Alden Pyle!” (Tang, 2003). Noyce expanded: “The issue is whether America's responsibility to the rest of the world justifies meddling in the internal affairs of other sovereign nations. We are facing that question with Iraq” (Gorbach, n.d.).

The film narrates a love triangle between a middle-aged English journalist, his young Vietnamese mistress, and a young US doctor in 1952 Saigon on the eve of United States involvement in the Vietnam War. The story is told through the eyes of Thomas Fowler, who lives with his Vietnamese mistress Phuong but is married to a Catholic woman who remains back in England. Fowler and Phuong meet Alden Pyle, who tells them he is a doctor who specializes in eye diseases. Fowler eventually discovers Pyle is a US spy. Pyle falls in love at first sight with Phuong. From that point the film describes two parallel stories: the story of the love triangle of Fowler, Phuong, and Pyle, and the story of Fowler's uncovering of secret US dealings with the South Vietnamese against the communists, which ultimately lead to the Vietnam War.

The film's love triangle is a metaphor for the Western world's intervention in Vietnamese governance and politics. Phuong stands in to represent the nation of Vietnam, while Fowler and Pyle are the well-meaning men who intend to save Phuong from her limited occupation as a dancer catering to foreign men. This behavior is most evident in the scene in Fowler's apartment where the men argue with each other over who can take better care of her while Phuong looks on. After the argument, the choice finally is posed to Phuong, who decides to stay with Fowler out of loyalty to him. As a metaphor, Phuong is passive, helpless Vietnam while Fowler is the benevolent (aging) Western colonizer and Pyle is the new imperialism of the United States. The film works on another metaphorical level through the discourse surrounding it. An examination of media discourse on the film shows an emphasis on the political opinions of the male filmmakers and actors. Cynthia Fuchs (2003) points out that despite Phuong being a major character in the film, the media neglected to address the role she plays as the object of men's desires. Indeed, interviews and press conferences focus more heavily on Brendan Fraser and Michael Caine, who play Pyle and Fowler, respectively. Moreover, Do Thi Hai Yen, who plays Phuong, is not presented in interviews as having deep insights into her role, while both Caine and Fraser speak in-depth on their roles. Actors Caine and Fraser discussed in interviews and in the director's commentary on the DVD release how they came to realize their characters, Caine bringing his experience in the Korean War to the film and Fraser researching the history of Vietnam for the film. One of the few anecdotes revealed about Do Thi Hai Yen coming to play this role is that she is the girlfriend of the actor Quang Hai, who plays General The, and doesn't speak English (Bffc.net, 2002). At the movie premiere, Fraser offered his view of Do: “Greene created Phuong as a symbolic representation of Vietnam. Do Thi Hai Yen represents great Southeast Asian dignity and beauty” (Vietnam News Agency, 2002). Her experience of making the film is voiced almost entirely by the director, Fraser, or Caine, and her thoughts on the film's message are completely absent from media discussion on the film.

Karen Shimakawa (2002) argues that when Asian American actors perform Asian roles for US audiences, they bring with them a history of images that imbue the Asian body with Orientalness. Indeed, the reason Do was chosen for this role appears to be because she embodied this Orientalness. Noyce explained why he chose Do, who had no previous acting experience, over 500 other Vietnamese women from all over the world who auditioned for the part: “She's the real thing [...] The Vietnamese diaspora had all been changed and polluted by the desire to be American or French. Because she had been locked away for so long, she really was a Vietnamese woman from the fifties. She has a certain reserve, she has a dignity” (Noyce, 2002). Noyce articulated Do as an authentic representation of Vietnamese women of the 1950s and, by doing so, contributes to the production of knowledge on Vietnamese womanhood as rooted in the exotic Orient, the Miss Saigon or the Vietnamese Madame Butterfly. Noyce confessed in an interview that a Vietnamese female friend of his voiced her criticism of the portrayal of Phuong, arguing that Phuong would not have found it as easy to leave Fowler for Pyle as shown in the film but would have been tortured by her feelings of loyalty (Gorbach, n.d.). By choosing not to allow Phuong the depth and complexity he does with Fowler and Pyle and by the limited discussion in the media of Do's contribution to the film, Phuong remains a mere narrative tool in a love triangle story that serves as a metaphor for players in war. Phuong succeeds as the object of desire of these two men, because she fits into the Oriental romance structure in which Lisa Lowe (1991) explains that both the woman of desire and the Orient are located as an Other, inaccessible and different. Phuong's passivity and ultimate resignation to her situation at the end of the film are made plausible as they fit her into what Gina Marchetti (1993) describes as a long history of Orientalist representations of the Madame Butterfly figure. Like Madame Butterfly, Phuong is an Asian woman who falls in love with a White man and submits to his authority. She is shown in the film as being suspicious of Pyle's activities but is allowed neither the space nor the disposition to question them.

The media discussion and the filmmaker's own comments on the film privilege a Western gaze of war over a more encompassing understanding of war's deep embeddings in the politics of race and gender. This Western gaze is both masculine (trumping any female participation in discussions) and imposing. Self and agency of the Vietnamese female are erased by the film's depictions of Vietnamese women and by its media discourse – the women are intended for sexual service for US men. Susan Jeffords argues that the discourse on the Vietnam War redefines constructions of what is masculine and feminine “so that women are effectively eliminated from the masculine narration of war and the society of which it is emblem, either by the masculine point of view from which the stories are told or by themselves as exiled ‘refugees’ from U.S. social relations” (1989, pp. 185–186). Information about Phuong, Do, and Vietnamese women is confined to what the filmmaker and media choose to dispense.

The film ends with newspaper headlines on the French withdrawal from Vietnam, the communists declaring war on South Vietnam, and the United States entering the Vietnamese civil war. The technique of flashing newspaper headlines at various points throughout the narrative attempts to imply the film as a report of the political events prior to the war. In doing so, The Quiet American reports an idea of the authentic Vietnamese woman to the US public through a reliance on photojournalism as the communication of reality. Phuong's reserve and resignation to her fate, as created by the men in her life and by the political events, demonstrate that even if Phuong did “speak” for herself, her fate is decided by the men and the political events. A love triangle as a metaphor for US foreign policy positions Vietnam as the feminine counterpart to the United States as self-declared protector and hero. In both the love triangle and the film's version of Vietnam's role in the war, Vietnamese women and Vietnam have no choice but to play out their destiny as pawns in the lovers'/Western political agenda. To further understand the representation of the West, the film underscores the ages of Fowler and Pyle as metaphors for the shifts within Western power. Fowler, the older man, represents the aging British Empire, while Pyle's youth, in contrast, suggests the rise of US imperialism. Media discussion on the film also interprets Phuong and Do as passive women. It is possible to invert such interpretations to discuss how Phuong might be fully aware that Vietnam is changing and that she makes choices based on an awareness of her country's revolution and her own condition. Yet what we see instead is an adherence to the trope of the Southeast Asian prostitute, who is represented with little complexity and functions as a character to further a director's statement on a different war.

While filmmakers and media characterized the film as more of a commentary on war and a caution against entering wars, I suggest that the film participates in a rearticulation of the colonialist framework of Orientalism. Interestingly, the film calls out the meddling of the United States overseas and makes transparent US interference in prolonging a long and bloody war. However, the problem is in the interpretation of Vietnam, symbolically represented through the female character, Phuong. As a subaltern, Phuong's ability to speak is managed by the men, symbolically representing competing Western nations. In media discussions on the film, the filmmakers had an opportunity to delve further into US foreign policy and to go beyond a critique of the United States as simply acting as cowboys and sheriffs in global politics. The film services the United States' neocolonialism by failing to interrogate the gendered relations in the love triangle and by advertising Do Thi Hai Yen as an authentic Vietnamese woman who, in her “authenticity,” creates what Trinh T. Minh-ha calls “the desire to acquire and protect it” (1989, p. 88). The gendered relations at the geopolitical level go unchallenged, while neocolonialist constructions of knowledge of the female Other remain intact.

Three Seasons: Tony Bui's Imagining of Vietnam's Future

In his memoir Jarhead (2003), Anthony Swofford describes his experience serving in the US Marines. He explains that the appeal of watching Vietnam War movies would incite the soldiers to violence. He writes: “All Vietnam war films are pro-war no matter what their supposed message [...] The magic brutality of the films celebrates the terrible and despicable beauty of our fighting skills.” Despite a film like Apocalypse Now being ultimately an antiwar tale, many films about the Vietnam War offer an eroticization of violence in warfare. For the men in Jarhead, the littering and disposal of bodies in Vietnam War films operate through an objectification of the enemy body. For example, the extended rape, torture, and murder of the Vietnamese woman in Casualties of War offer no narrativization beyond her body's sexual function. Viet Nguyen (1997) describes scenes such as these as a pornographic spectacle of death for Vietnamese viewers. In other words, they identify with the dead bodies that are objectified and sensationalized as enemy bodies in warfare. Filmed in the midst of a dramatic economic and cultural shift for Vietnam, the 1999 film Three Seasons is an attempt to move the focus on Vietnam from the US perspective of a pornographic spectacle to Vietnamese perspectives.

Vietnamese American director and writer Tony Bui intended to create a feature film that would showcase Vietnam to US and international audiences. He wrote Three Seasons, which was filmed mostly in the Vietnamese language. Americans, here, mainly are extras who are driven around the city in cyclos, while Vietnamese fill most of the leading roles. Three Seasons was the first US film given permission by the Vietnamese government to be filmed entirely on location in Vietnam since the war. Released in 1999 by October Films, Three Seasons was well received in its showing at the Sundance Film Festival, grossing over $2 million and showing in 66 theaters in the United States.

The film follows four narrative threads of Vietnamese characters and one American man in Saigon, a.k.a. Ho Chi Minh City. Kien An, a young woman, goes to work as a harvester in the lotus ponds where she meets a reclusive teacher, The Dao, living in a temple in the middle of the pond. Cyclo driver Hai falls in love with the prostitute Lan, who longs to live the life of people in air-conditioned hotels. Named after his Woody Woodpecker t-shirt, Woody is the 8-year-old boy who works the street at night to sell trinkets to tourists outside of bars. James Hager is the US veteran in search of his Amerasian daughter, whom he knows only by a photograph.

A review in Sight & Sound (Macnab, 2000) criticizes the film for its discontinuity in editing when the film jumps from scenes of rain to scenes of clear weather. The reviewer misses the point of the main theme of the film, made obvious by its title, Three Seasons. In Vietnam, only three seasons are recognized: dry, wet, and growth. Tony Bui intended the seasons as a metaphor for the cyclical changes in Vietnamese culture. He described the influence of his personal journeys to Vietnam, which shaped his impression of Vietnamese culture and eventually his filmmaking: “Visually, I was so struck and affected by what I saw. There were so many changes. It's a country going through a stage of influence. In 1992, there were Russian ships and kiosks everywhere. By 1997, all of that was gone, replaced by Coca-Cola and Pepsi signs and taxis – taxis didn't even exist in Vietnam in 1993. From 1992 to 1997 there was a dramatic change and influence, and it was all Western” (LoBrutto, 1999). This Western influence Bui describes is represented throughout his film by the large Coca-Cola and Maxwell billboards decorating the Ho Chi Minh landscape, camera shots of towering skyscrapers in the process of being built, and the proliferation of hotels catering to wealthy foreigners. The transnational corporate presence in Vietnam was made possible in part by the Clinton administration's lifting of the US embargo on Vietnam in 1996. The removal of the embargo accelerated the growth of US trade with Vietnam and its exploitation of Vietnam's labor resources.

Bui works the theme of economic and cultural change in the film not only in the background but also within the stories themselves. Kien An, the young woman who finds employment as a lotus harvester, wanders the street every day to sell her bundles of flowers, which she carries in baskets across her shoulders. One day she notices a group of men selling lotus flowers from the back of their truck. The flowers are plastic, mass produced, and cheaper to buy than the real ones. The film reveals its nostalgia for the days prior to mass-produced plastic flowers when women labored in ponds to handpick each blossom. This nostalgia reappears when The Dao, the reclusive teacher hiding his disfigured body from the world, desires to hear the song the women in the floating market of his childhood sang, which Kien An sings as she harvests the flowers. He describes his longing: “I had forgotten my youth, the only time I was pure and whole, until I heard your song.”

Woody, the child, represents the potential of a lost childhood. He works at night selling souvenirs in such places as the famous bar Apocalypse Now, and gets drunk for the first time when James Hager offers him beer. However, he has moments of a child at play. Later, he is shown play-acting in a Western gun fight; he watches cartoons in electronic stores and joins in a street soccer game. All these activities evoke the nostalgia of youth.

This longing for youth is reiterated in the story of the prostitute, Lan. She recounts to Hai, the cyclo driver, stories of her school days when she wore a white ao dai and walked along a beautiful grove. Hai tells her that there are better ways for her to make money than through prostitution. Lan replies that she dreams of living the life of people in hotels. She says, “The sun rises for them and we live in their shadows,” admitting that she would marry one of them just to gain that lifestyle. Lan's character suggests a desire to fulfill constructed needs, in which she believes the luxurious life of hotels is the epitome of an ideal lifestyle. Such a constructed desire may be the result of this global capitalist expansion into post-embargo Vietnam. In the end, she returns to walk in her garden grove in her white ao dai after she has given up being a prostitute.

The film implies that it is possible to erase the effects of war and capitalism on one's life if one chooses to. Kien An decides to return to the floating market of The Dao's childhood where factory-made flowers have yet to dominate. Lan renounces her life of prostitution, dons the dress of her school days, and accepts the life she has. Woody continues with his youth and gains a young friend. James Hager finds his daughter, who has become a bia om girl, a woman who serves as a date for men in bars. He tells her that he intends to do right by her. Hai remains as he was at the start of the film, a cyclo driver with a good heart. The moral is that he ends up with his object of affection because he remained true to his sense of self.

This theme also appears in Nguyen Du's classic nineteenth-century Vietnamese epic poem, Truyen Kieu, or The Tale of Kieu, about Kieu, a woman who is passed from man to man, from marriage to prostitution, and to a new, but platonic, lover. Through it all, she fulfills her familial duties to her father and lover and retains her sense of obligation as a woman. This poem remains popular for Vietnamese in Vietnam because it is a metaphor for Vietnam, which endured centuries of outside invasion by Chinese and French colonialism and US imperialism. Prostitution is Kieu's moment of submission, but she is able to recoup herself by marrying a man for whom she has only platonic feelings. Three Seasons appeals to this romanticized notion of a nation through the character of Lan, who engages in the immorality of prostitution but later forsakes it. Darrell Hamamoto's (2000) examination of Three Seasons posited that Lan's character is a metaphor for a recuperation of Vietnam's fall from grace following the war. He argues that the film implies a post-imperial Vietnam is available for pimping to transnational corporations when the film captures the symbols of capitalist development – advertising billboards and the building of skyscrapers. Lan, like Kieu, persists through difficult times by selling her body. She is a modern Kieu living in a country that is being quickly integrated into a global capitalist economy. While I agree with Hamamoto's conclusion that the film puts forth Vietnam as available for “pimping” to transnational corporations, I also argue that Bui offers his film as a way to suggest how Vietnam can retain its identity in the face of social crises resulting from the inevitable capitalist integration.

Three Seasons distances itself from US films on Vietnam that objectify Vietnamese bodies, particularly women's bodies, in an attempt to reconcile its traumatic experience of the war. As Marita Sturken (1997) suggests, the Vietnam veteran's story is ever present and is a form of memory. This selective memory dominates over and rewrites the Vietnamese story for the veteran's catharsis. Three Seasons, on the other hand, has Vietnamese characters with stories that do not depend on the objectification of their bodies for audiences. There are narratives about Vietnamese women that indicate more than the function of their bodies for sex and death – that is, they are depicted as making choices in a rapidly changing society. However, the objectification of bodies that does occur in the film is in the nostalgia of bodies in labor prior to the war and integration into the global economy. The manual labor of Kien An and the renunciation of Lan's sexual labor promote a return to a past prior to an economy marked by flexible accumulation and capitalist exploitation of third world labor. Yet a return to this past in reality is impossible because Vietnam itself cannot reverse its accelerated integration into global capitalism.

For director and writer Tony Bui, social change is cyclical, like the changing of seasons. Three Seasons resolves the social dilemmas (prostituting one's self and conspicuous consumption) that arise from the expansion of capitalism into Vietnam by suggesting that one can choose to remember the past and choose to live true to one's principles. At the end of the film, Hai hands Lan the book he has been seen reading throughout the film. The title of the book finally is revealed to the audience. It reads in Vietnamese: “Ren Nhan Cach” (translated as “be persistent in living a moral life,” a modern Vietnamese self-help book). The past that Three Seasons desires is an idealized past. The film disregards the new labor complexities that result from Vietnam being thrust into global capitalist expansion after the lifting of the embargo. The demand for prostitutes and bia om girls only grows as more foreigners invest in the country and hotels continue to rise to accommodate them. It is likely that Kien An and other women in her socioeconomic position eventually will have to find low-wage work in one of the many transnational factories made possible by flexible accumulation. Three Seasons invokes a classic Vietnamese text using a woman's body as metaphor for a nation and, thus, includes Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans in a story of Vietnam that takes into account the war and the experience of a country in capitalist development. It expands representations of the Vietnamese subjective experience by not resorting to the pornographic spectacle of dead or dying bodies. While giving more narrative substance to Vietnamese, the film makes Vietnamese women coherent and complete only when they have epiphanic moments of returning to a mythic and idealized past. It implies that, like The Tale of Kieu, one can return to an authentic culture and salvage one's virtue even after being exposed to immoral practices. Three Seasons engages with the past by claiming that a return to it is natural because social change is cyclical. It offers more depth to the Vietnamese affected by the war. However, the influence of capitalist intervention and the global flows on cultural and national identity remain unquestioned in this film, and this notion of the cyclical nature of society leaves us with the impossible quest for an authentic past.

Conclusions

While Three Seasons broadened representations of Vietnamese women in sex and death, all three films, either in the film narratives and/or in media discussions on the film, construct Vietnamese women's bodies as portals for an authentic Vietnam that existed prior to the United States' memory of war, colonization, and advanced globalization. Earlier Vietnam War films articulated an abstract Vietnamese woman who functioned more as a body count in the US soldier's narrative. As Vietnam and the United States began to normalize their economic and political relations in the early 1990s, the films carried a nostalgia for an idealized past. US multinational corporations are seeking to open operations in Vietnam, while tourists find it to be an affordable and exotic locale. Vietnam has been rewritten to be open and accessible to global capitalist investment, while Vietnamese women are portals to an idyllic life prior to US military intervention and the crisis of national identity. The three films examined here depart from other Vietnam War films by incorporating Vietnamese women's characters as central to the narrative. The films also offer an alternative perspective to the cinematic responses to the Vietnam Syndrome. As the films look to Vietnam's future, they also look back in search of an authentic Vietnam that is attainable through the bodies of Vietnamese women.

The United States' identity crisis has worked on and through the bodies of Vietnamese women in the form of sex and death. The Vietnamese actresses in Heaven and Earth and The Quiet American were both plucked out of obscurity and had no prior acting experience. Their “innocence” and “authenticity” became strategies for selling the films to audiences, where Vietnam could be displayed as retaining elements of that nostalgic past. Their characters' sexuality is compromised, and the culprits are men of war from both sides. Three Seasons, the one film by a Vietnamese American filmmaker that is shot almost entirely in Vietnamese, further supports a neocolonial discourse by advocating a return to that past, as a Vietnamese prostitute forsakes her lifestyle influenced by Western materialism for a return to an idyllic childhood. Her sexuality is what is at stake in that forsaking. The return to a prewar era, when life was unspoiled by global capitalism and US corruption and vices, is hocked to the audience as part of the experience of Vietnam and Vietnamese people.

Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (1994) assert that Hollywood films about non-White life stories speak for marginalized communities and, thus, hinder attempts to represent themselves. Media discussion and the film narratives act in conjunction to produce and reiterate the trope of the Southeast Asian prostitute. The trope of the Southeast Asian prostitute serves this neocolonial discourse in identifying Vietnam as having been contaminated by political, economic, and military interventions, just as the Vietnamese prostitute in the films has been compromised by individuals who have been part of these same interventions. The Southeast Asian prostitute in the context of Vietnam allegorizes the positioning of Vietnam as feminine in need of care, guidance, and rescue, like the benevolent United States, a myth of discovery, during colonization. She/Vietnam cannot represent herself; she must be represented. Her story must always be told in relation to her lover, rapist, or client. Within the media discourse on the films, the filmmakers and Western male actors are privileged over the Vietnamese actresses. All three films suggest that the presence of the masculine is necessary for the Vietnamese woman in articulating her subjectivity.

In an examination of the media discourse on the films and the films' narratives, who speaks becomes more of a question of who is speaking for the actresses and their characters. The construction of their characters on screen as a return to an exotic past also was reflected offscreen in media discourse on the films. During the period of normalization of relations between Vietnam and the United States (and the lifting of the embargo), these films on Vietnam articulated meaning and desire that served a neocolonial stance. No longer does the United States seek to occupy other nations territorially, but, through the strategies of advanced globalization and flexible accumulation, the United States occupies Vietnam economically. The nostalgic return to Vietnam's past through the women's bodies is obscured when films and filmmakers reflect on the consequences of war without attention to the connotation of Orientalism in war, both on screen and offscreen, for Vietnamese women.

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