Catherine Earl
On auspicious days — determined by a reading of the lunar calendar (am lick) — the steps of colonial-era buildings in downtown Ho Chi Minh City are crowded with bridal couples and their camera crews. Trailed by a flurry of tulle, a camera crew and her groom, a bride stops traffic as she charges across the road from the Ho Chi Minh City Post Office to the Du’c Ba Cathedral. The couple’s photographs will be displayed as posters at their upcoming wedding party and later in their home as a backdrop for their family life. The photographer issues instructions for the pose. The bride leans the stark white of her heavily made-up cheek on the lapel of the groom’s hired suit and gazes up through her false eyelashes towards his face. He rests a supportive arm across her back and gazes down on her lovingly. ‘Very beautiful’, the photographer concludes.
A smiling couple with bride in a flowing white gown and groom in a suit may be recognised almost globally as the image of a wedding. Portraits of marriage in Vietnam are shaped by a long history of competing local and transnational cultural influences. A thousand years of Han (Chinese) rule over Vietnam ended in 938 CE. This left a Sinitic, more precisely Confucian, cultural influence in social and political life that expanded under Vietnamese ruling dynasties until French annexation in the nineteenth century. European humanism, religion and social organisation flourished, particularly among educated and urban elites, during French colonial rule. Anti-colonial movements of the early twentieth century added Marxist ideology to the mix. Colonialism in Vietnam ended after the First Indochina War (1945—54) and the Geneva Accords which divided Vietnam into two nations — Ho Chi Minh’s communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north and the American-backed capitalist Republic of Vietnam in the south. The postcolonial period in Vietnam, from 1954 to 1975, was a time of war. During the Second Indochina War (also known as the ‘Vietnam War’), North Vietnam was shaped by communism and aligned with the broader Soviet/socialist world, while South Vietnam was shaped by Anglo-European popular and material culture in the context of a service-based wartime boom economy (Anderson 2011; Bradley 2009; Marr 1981).
When national reunification was achieved in 1975, the new Socialist Republic of Vietnam was a socially and culturally diverse nation. Post-war rebuilding aimed to unify the population under communist rule. Decades of war had left Vietnam with one of the most uneven sex ratios in the world and many Vietnamese women were unable to find a marriage partner (Haughton and Haughton 1995: 325—37). Post-war development expanded with nationwide macro-economic reforms (doi mdІ) introduced in 1986, and investment from countries in Northeast Asia brought new cultural influences (Thomas 2002). The reforms enabled the population to rise out of poverty and engage with its Southeast Asian neighbours. Overseas Vietnamese, refugees of the Vietnam War who had settled predominantly in North America, Europe and Pacific Asia, remit not only financial resources but also a diversity of cultural influences. Major cities like Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City now support a growing middle class and globalised cosmopolitan elites (Earl n. d.; Nguyen-Marshall, Drummond and Belanger 2012).
In social life, as Robert Desjarlais (2003: 6) points out, ‘the phenomenal and the discursive, life as lived and life as talked about, are like the intertwining strands of a braided rope, each complexly involved in the other, in time’. In the portrait introduced above, on the one hand, the bride who marches across the road is an agent of change, leading the way to the photo-shoot location and symbolically into married life. On the other hand, she poses as a demure and devoted wife and is admired for her feminine beauty. There are thus differentiated but intertwining discourses of heteronormativity in contemporary Vietnam. While alternative sexualities are ‘tolerated’, heteronormativity involves the privileging of heterosexuality and the marginalisation of non-heterosexuality (and non-procreative sexuality).
Life as lived in post-reform Vietnam contrasts with life as talked about, particularly concerning gendered change and the flexibility of gender practices in daily life (Hoang and Yeoh 2011: 733; Leshkowich 2011: 278). Life as talked about, however, reflects changes in daily life. State-endorsed discourses continue to be dynamic and responsive to social, political and economic conditions. With ideological shifts in twentieth-century Vietnam through colonial, postcolonial and socialist contexts, the cultural landscapes of twenty-first-century Vietnam comprise a diversity of discursive layers, intertwining the discursive and the phenomenal (Werner 2009: 5).
This chapter draws on ethnographic and sociological research conducted by Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese researchers on heterosexual love and marriage in Vietnam. First, I outline the competing discursive layers that centre on family structure, gender equality, romantic love and idealised gender roles in twenty-first-century Vietnam in order to point out the distance between discursive and actual family life. Second, I highlight that control of female heterosexuality is central to discourses of gender, marriage and family in Vietnam, although increased attention on female heterosexuality in urban Vietnam is not a new feature of the post-reform era. Third, I point out that, although women are portrayed discursively as passive and dependent, they act as agents of social change to negotiate stigmatised social positions into valued and desired roles in the family.