Diasporic Returns and the Making of

Vietnamese American Ghost Films in

Vietnam

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Lan Duong
University of California, Riverside

Since the end of the Vietnam War, it has been a cliché for writers, politicians, and
journalists in the United States to speak about the “ghosts of war” as an enduring
metaphor for the effects that the war has on the minds and bodies of Americans.
“Vietnam” still casts a pall over today’s political discourses about war, refugees,
and US foreign policy. For scholars in Vietnam studies, the “ghosts of war”
appear in research about the social relations between the living and the dead
in the post-war era; anthropologists, for example, have analyzed the ways that
ghosts exert a symbolic and material influence on those grappling with the terrific
changes the country has undergone through the ghosting of narratives.1 Unlike
this body of work, which considers the impact of ghosts on lived realities, I
am interested in the ways that ghosts have come to life in the form of film, most
specifically in the movies directed by Vietnamese Americans who work in
Vietnam. Such highly commercial films and their modes of production provide
a compelling trace of diasporic history, one borne out of war and displacement,
within narratives of the nation.
To look at ghost films is to touch on “ghostly matters” indeed,2 for the genre in
Vietnamese film history is ghostly itself, barely registering as a genre because of a
Communist ban on superstition since the founding of the Republic of North
Vietnam in 1945. Thereafter, as Heonik Kwon writes,
the postcolonial states of Vietnam have made enormous administrative and polit-
ical efforts to battle against traditional religious beliefs and ritual customs; first in
the northern half of the country by the revolutionary communist state after the
August Revolution of 1945 and particularly after the 1946-54 Independence War
against France, and then across the regions after the reunification of the country
in 1975. (11)
When North Vietnam established itself as a Communist and secular state, it
deemed superstitious beliefs, or mê tı́n di do an,
: backwards and morally deficient;
bans on spiritual practices in the latter half of the twentieth century have made it

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DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlw029
MELUS  Volume 41  Number 3  (Fall 2016) 153
 Duong

taboo to deal with the supernatural in film. As a result, not many ghost films exist
in the country’s film archives, constituting an evocative absence within the space
of the national archive.3 But contemporary films of this genre are further framed
by a haunting of history; they incorporate the work and finances of those who

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were cast outside the national family after the war ended in 1975. While before
the end of the war, Vietnamese refugees were denounced as traitors to the
national family—and thus viewed as symbolically dead by the state—the dias-
pora, specifically those who are or born of Vietnamese refugees, are revenants
of an interesting and important kind; they return as investors, tourists, artists,
and filmmakers. The state increasingly incorporates and ingests their labor
and talent as part of its efforts to promote Vietnamese culture in a global frame.
The film Ngôi Nhà Trong Heœm (House in the Alley) (2013) exemplifies this
dynamic. Directed by Vietnamese American filmmaker Lê Văn Ki^e: t, the film
takes place in a haunted house in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) and show-
cases the specter of a host of problematic relations between husband and wife,
worker and employer. As signaled by the tropes of labor framing the film,
House engages with questions of displacement and diasporic capital at the level
of the textual and extratextual. My reading of the film centralizes the figures of
the dispossessed that operate vis-à-vis the female character and as they are found
in the film’s production. At the film’s heart is a middle-class wife who miscarries
her child and discovers that a legion of orphan ghosts has taken over her house.
Embodying abjection and terror when possessed by these ghosts, she serves as an
expression for the grief of the stillborn and those rendered invisible by the state’s
project of rapid urban development: the country’s dispossessed are those gener-
ations that have succeeded the war and who now live through Vietnam’s global-
izing present.
The dispossessed, however, also alludes to the diaspora in the film’s context.
While House deals with historically suppressed subjects such as ghosts and the
supernatural within the country’s national culture, the film’s making bespeaks
the prominent roles that diasporans now play in the nation’s afterlife. The motif
of the haunted house and the eerie disturbances that trouble its residents resonate
with the modes by which the state seeks to manage and incorporate diasporic dif-
ference within the house that is the nation-state. Forty years after the formation of
the diaspora, diasporic returns have come back in the form of actual and cultural
capital to rejuvenate an almost moribund film industry in the country.
Understood through this optic, the film is symptomatic of a Derridean trace, indi-
cating the extent to which the occulted Other is present in the sign and reveals
itself to be an absent presence.4 Absent is the presence of the diaspora in state
narratives and the forces by which the diaspora has been vital to the nation-state
and its development. While the state tries to efface the history of those originating
from South Vietnam and, more specifically, of refugees who fled the Communist
regime post-1975, cultural production in the country is now redolent with capital,
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ideas, and talent arising from the diaspora. House allows us to chart the cultural
genealogy of the genre in Vietnamese cinema and highlights how narratives of
diasporic return are shadowed by history and capital. The analysis that follows
activates the occulted presence in the film to show that what remains ghostly
in the articulations of a globalized Vietnamese nationhood are the vestiges of a

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diasporic history.

The Vietnamese Film Industry: Revolution and Renovation

In 1975, Vietnam plunged into a decade of extreme poverty, exacerbated by the
exodus of thousands of Vietnamese and ethnic Chinese, border wars with
Cambodia and China, and the US trade embargo. As a response to these crises,
the Fifth Party Congress implemented a historic roster of economic reforms called
- œ^oi Mo’ i, or Renovation. These reforms introduced Vietnam to a system of social-
D
ist capitalism, or capitalism with a socialist orientation, designed to slowly open
the country to the free market while still upholding the socialist values on which it
was founded. Since D - œ^oi Mo’ i, the country has become more of an economic force
within the Southeast Asian region than a socialist stronghold. An index of the
country’s global presence is found in its membership in the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the World Trade Organization (WTO),
beginning in 1995 and 2007, respectively. Most recently, the United States signed
the Transpacific Partnership with Vietnam and other countries, a historic treaty
that allows US corporations unprecedented access to Vietnamese labor and mar-
kets. While Vietnam’s economy has been revitalized in the last two decades, the
sociopolitical issues afflicting Vietnamese society are multiple; the gap between
the rich and poor is ever widening, land ownership disputes bedevil relations
between ethnic minorities and the government, and the state continues to crack
down on political dissent and religious freedom.
On the cultural front, D - œ^oi Mo’ i has created the conditions for the Vietnamese
film and publishing industries to develop, allowing for greater cultural exchange
between Vietnam and other countries. Vietnam’s foreign policies permit dia-
sporic artists to return to the homeland and work with the government to produce
their work. Once denounced as “traitors” for having left the homeland,
Vietnamese diasporans are now an “integral part of the nation” (Collet and
Furuya 56). Recent immigration laws, which include the granting of five-year
visas for Viet Kieu in 2007, foster the improved standing for this community.
One year later, the state allows for dual citizenship, which ensures that the older
and 1.5 generations of the diaspora become naturalized citizens in the country in
which they were born.
In line with these legislative acts, the development of diasporic films forms a
crucial aspect of Vietnamese cinema today. Vietnamese American actors, direc-
tors, and producers return to the country in order to make a variety of
155
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commercially viable genre films customized for a Vietnamese market. This group
of artists makes up a larger group of Vietnamese diasporic returnees known col-
loquially as Viet Kieu, a term that is used by journalists and writers alike. As John
Boudreau writes, “Viet Kieu are now involved with at least half of the commercial

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films made in Vietnam—a stunning development considering that not long ago
those who returned faced deep suspicion from the Communist government as
well as opposition from staunch anti-Communists in San Jose and Orange
County.” Sociologists have called this phenomenon of travel, especially marked
for Asian Americans in recent years, “return migration.” As Jane Yamashiro
notes, depending on the country’s labor needs, the receiving Asian country often
changes its laws to attract and accommodate more skilled workers. She writes:
“[M]igration policies that establish special visas and residency statuses for ethnic
return migrants provide opportunities not only for financial gain but also to con-
nect or reconnect with homeland cultures, and familial and social networks”
(21-22). In particular, Yamashiro discusses two types of migration patterns; “re-
turn migration” is the process by which first generation migrants return to the
homeland, whereas “ethnic return migration” is the movement of later foreign
nationals to their ancestral homelands. In the latter case, “the migrant may
not speak the language or know the culture” when they return (22). Because of
the rising phenomenon of “ethnic return migration” for the 1.5 and second gen-
eration of Vietnamese Americans, US journalists have understood this movement
as one in which the youth are now returning to Vietnam in order to pursue—
ironically—the “American Dream.”5
Reports such as these do not take into account the ways that transnational
movements are conditioned by diasporic class privilege and influenced by state
politics and policies, which target the diaspora directly. In 2004, the state promul-
gated Resolution No. 36, which posited that the overseas Vietnamese community
is “an integral part of the nation” (qtd. in Collet and Furuya 56).6 In 2009, as Nga
Pham writes, the state then facilitated a three-day convocation in Hanoi that
“1,000 overseas Vietnamese attended; discussions centered on Vietnamese retur-
nees and the need for them to help modernize the country.” The incentive to
attract the Vietnamese diaspora to the homeland remains strong and cloaked
in language that accents ties to the national family despite the state’s dismissal
of refugee histories and memories. Writing on the commemorations of refugee
camps, Ashley Carruthers and Boitran Huynh-Beattie point out that against a
context of a South Vietnamese memory that is being “disappeared” by the state,
the Vietnamese government has been actively “trying to woo the diaspora in the
West to participate in a project of transnational nation-building” (149).
The state’s gesture of inclusion towards the diaspora is perhaps best under-
stood in economic terms, underscored by the fact that remittances to Vietnam
total in the billions. At last estimate, the Vietnamese diaspora sent eleven billion
dollars to Vietnam in 2013 (“Remittances”). The annual incomes of those living
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abroad also represent a tremendous amount of money that can be tapped. As Ivan
V. Small notes, “The emotionally laden notion of homeland ‘return’ is strategi-
cally deployed and economically calculated by the state, resulting in varying
degrees of embodiment of the ‘overseas Vietnamese’ identity” (237). Small argues

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for an understanding of the ways in which the government constructs embodied
subjectivities, particularly through the language of nostalgia for those who return.
For the state, returnees are economic “bridges” between their country of perma-
nent residence and the home country of Vietnam (238).
Befitting this backdrop, Vietnamese American filmmakers make highly com-
mercial films (phim thi: tru’o’ ng) that cannot simply be characterized as exilic or
nostalgic narratives.7 Box office receipts for commercial filmmaking by directors
such as Victor Vu and Charlie Nguyen show the extraordinary rise of what
Vietnamese film scholar Viet Van Tran describes as the work of Viet Kieu direc-
tors who have “master[ed] the most advanced techniques and are in touch with
the latest trends of world cinema” (206). Changing the look and landscape of
Vietnamese cinema, Vietnamese American filmmakers, some of whom have
grown up in Los Angeles and Orange County, now travel back and forth to
Saigon to make movies in and about Vietnam. Connections between southern
California and southern Vietnam are crucial here because of the ways that net-
works of support have been established along these routes of return. As they
travel to Vietnam with technical expertise and experience to make films, directors
such as Ham Tran and Stephane Gauger also hail from a vibrant Vietnamese
American popular culture industry that is unique to Orange County, California.
From the directors’ viewpoint, making films in Vietnam makes most financial
sense because the costs of producing films is cheaper, the market for Vietnamese-
language film is greater (eighty million people in the country versus three million
in the diaspora), and Vietnamese production companies such as Galaxy often pay
directors to make low-cost films in the country. Actors such as Dustin Nguyen (of
21 Jump Street [1987-91] fame) and Johnny Tri Nguyen (a former stuntman in films
such as Spider-Man [2002]) also have a better chance of achieving success in
Vietnam than in the United States, where they are minoritized and shut out of
the Hollywood film industry. In her schemata of different forms of transnational
filmmaking, Mette Hjort delineates how this body of work can be categorized under
the rubric of an “opportunistic transnational cinema,” in which “priority [is given]
to economic issues to the point where monetary factors dictate the selection of part-
ners beyond national borders” (19). As such, however, films by Vietnamese
American filmmakers who work in Vietnam do not readily fit under the rubric
of Asian/American directors, as the imperative to make films here is a combination
of opportunity, nostalgia, and pragmatism and a form of transnational return that
impacts how Asian Americans view Asia and how Asians look back at Asian
America. Analyzing return narratives in Vietnamese American literature, Chih-
ming Wang argues that understanding the larger geopolitical context is critical
157
 Duong

as the work of memory and movement “allow[s] us to capture the complex trans-
Pacific politics that is reshaping the meaning of Asian United States today” (164).
The movement of Vietnamese American filmmakers who return and whose
filmmaking practices are further complicated by the fact of state control captures

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these trans-Pacific politics. Making films under the auspices of the Vietnamese
state means that the directors’ aesthetics and themes are shaped by state censor-
ship controls and the tactics of surveillance. Chris Dixon argues that the
Vietnamese state operates in an authoritarian manner in this regard:
[S]ince the beginning of the reform period, the Vietnamese state has significantly
softened. However, the retreat from authoritarianism has taken place unevenly; the
state has retained very considerable power to clamp down, certainly in the short
run. This is demonstrated in occasional, abrupt, often apparently arbitrary and
sometimes extreme, manifestations of authoritarian rule. (25)
Such actions serve as “reminders of the state’s power and as warnings to those
engaged in non-sanctioned activities” (25). Vietnamese American filmmakers
are not immune to this expression of power, being given some leeway in the
depiction of violence, sex, and history even as they must avoid subjects that
are taboo, such as the American war, re-education, Vietnamese refugees, South
Vietnamese resentment, and anti-communist feeling.8
Even so, censorship controls in Vietnam have seen dramatic changes in the
past ten years, a laxity found in the ways that certain genre films can be made,
including a recent trend in Vietnamese filmmaking: the horror film (phim kinh
di: ). While before these drastic changes few filmmakers could make ghost films
in Vietnam because of a Communist ban on supernatural practices and lack of
funding, now films explicitly deal with death, spirits, and the afterlife.
Alongside this development is the phenomenon of transnational collaborations.
An important film of this kind was the Korean-Vietnamese horror film Mu’o’ i
(Ten) (2007), directed by a Korean filmmaker and shot in central Vietnam and
Korea. The film’s gory scenes promulgated a first-time ever ratings system in
the country and was nonetheless a big success with Vietnamese audiences.
Other films such as Khi Yêu D - u’ ng Quay L ai
: (Don’t Look Back) (2010), directed
by Vietnamese American director Nguy~ ^en-Võ Minh-Nghiêm, and Vietnamese
films such as Gi~u’a Hai Th ^e Gio’ i (Between Two Worlds) (2011), featuring
Dustin Nguyen, have followed in this film’s wake.
The use of the occult in film also aligns with the current official revival of spir-
itual practices in Vietnam, which have a long history of suppression, especially
when the practitioners have been women (Norton 22). As Karen Fjelsted and
Thi Hien Nguyen argue, however, with the economic and social reforms known
as Renovation, the government has “loosened state controls on religious practice
and reinserted Vietnam into the global market system. . . . Popular ritual prac-
tices, including many that had previously been viewed by the state as ‘social evils,’

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are now flourishing in Vietnam” (7). Other scholars note that while the state has
opened its doors to globalization, it also attempts to preserve its “national cul-
ture” against foreign influences by embracing the spiritual practices of many
of its religious and ethnic Others that constitute Vietnam’s diverse population.

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Barley Norton observes that in the reform era, “the preservation and exaltation
of culture (văn hóa) as a means of bolstering the ‘national identity’ (baœn sac
dân to: c) has become a pervasive institutionalized mantra” (6). According to
Alexander Woodside, the turn to “cultural neotraditionalism” becomes a way
for the state to create an authentic, cultural bulwark against which the forces
of globalization would be blunted and “is part of the renegotiation of authoritar-
ianism in a postcollectivist era, not its abandonment” (71). The state’s ongoing
celebration of diversity and multiculturalism dovetails well with its interests in
reviving spiritual traditions as a way to attract both domestic and international
tourism today.
On the question of spirits and the state, post-war Vietnam embodies what
Pheng Cheah calls “spectral nationality,” in which the postcolonial state lives
on the lifeblood of past revolutionary ideals, possessing the people that toil under
it as its host body. Interrogating the dynamic between the state and the people,
life and death, Cheah writes: “The state is an uncontrollable specter that the
nation-people must welcome within itself, and direct, at once for itself and against
itself, because this specter can possess the nation-people and bend it toward
global capitalist interests” (247). Cheah explores the ontology of nationalism to
argue that nationalist ideology is itself a haunting. Nationalism after decoloniza-
tion, he argues, invades the living body of the people and transforms the people
into ideological prostheses for the nation. In response, the people must house this
phantom invasion at the same time that they must also try to resist it. Such is the
paradox for those who belong to the nation and who try to effect some power over
their state of belonging. In the present moment, the Vietnamese state “lives on”
(or, to use Cheah’s word, sur-vie) through its management of the past, ideology,
capital, and everyday life.
Cheah’s formulations are useful in analyzing the conditions of production for
the movie House in the Alley. House shows how state nationalism “lives on” via
diasporic filmmaking and the regulatory measures it undergoes to find life on the
screen. Imprinted in its modes of production, the film animates the paradox of
national belonging; it conjures the dead and brings to the surface a repressed past
that figures the diaspora as former inhabitants of a past nation. In its deployment
of diasporic capital, House tests the limits of what it means for the diasporic sub-
ject to belong to and labor for a spectral nation. Through this film and others, I
make a case for how the ligaments between the national and transnational con-
stitute the ways in which ghost films are produced in Vietnam by several
Vietnamese American filmmakers, dubbed the “Viet Film Wave” by California
newspapers.9
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 Duong

Revenants and Returns: A House in the Alley in South Vietnam

“Viet Film Wave” directors, some of whose families comprised the waves of ref-
ugees coming from South Vietnam after the war ended in 1975, hail from south-
ern California and are working in Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City, today. Their work

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is structured by a political economy of filmmaking that favors the production of
films in Vietnam because of the country’s cheap costs of labor. It is also informed
by media networks that help to leverage their standing in Vietnam as directors
who have brought (home) their technical expertise to the film industry. Their turn
as well-known directors at home and abroad pivots on their multiple returns to
Vietnam. Recently, the Vietnamese state has recognized the potential of diasporic
returns and encouraged migrations back to the homeland with key pieces of leg-
islation concerning cinema and citizenship.
Exemplary of this trajectory has been the work of transnational Vietnamese
American director Lê Văn Ki^e: t, who has made two films about Vietnamese
Americans in Orange County: Dust of Life (2006) and Sad Fish (2009). Since
2009, he has turned to making horror films in Vietnam for a mostly Vietnamese
audience, including House in the Alley and Bœ^ay C^a: p 3 (Trap Level 3) (2013), which
was banned before it was released in Vietnam because of its gratuitous sex and vio-
lence. House was screened in the metropolitan areas of Saigon and Hanoi in March
2012 and was then distributed throughout other regions of the country (D. Tran,
“Hello”). It was also shown at the Vietnamese International Film Festival (now
Viet Film Fest) in Orange County in 2013. Such are the routes of distribution
and exhibition through which many Vietnamese American-directed films now
circulate.
The film’s mode of travel also points to the nodes of a robust popular culture
that circulate between “Little Saigons” of the diaspora and “Big Saigon”
(Carruthers 68). On 30 April 1975, the Vietnam War ended with the
Communist takeover of Saigon, the capital city in South Vietnam. The
“reunification” of the country included brutal reeducation camps for former
South Vietnamese soldiers and sex workers, the repossession of property and
land in the region, and the forced migration of many urbanites to the countryside
to New Economic Zones (NEZs) in the country’s surge toward a centrally planned
economy. In the decades following the “fall” of Saigon,10 countless southern
Vietnamese, many of whom were former US allies, fled in successive waves to
countries such as the United States, France, and Australia, forming the
Vietnamese diaspora. In the United States, California has become the state in
which large numbers of Vietnamese refugees and immigrants have resettled.
Now home to the largest Vietnamese population outside of Vietnam, California
is also the “birthplace” of a particular cultural empire: the Vietnamese
American variety show. Originating more than three decades ago, variety shows

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such as Paris by Night, Asia, and Vân So’ n are part of a major cultural industry
produced by and for the Vietnamese diaspora.11
The connective tissues between Vietnamese American subcultures and the cul-
ture of filmmaking in Vietnam provide an entrée into the examination of House’s
textual and extratextual address. The film’s use of spectacle is derived from

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Vietnamese American cultural shows such as Paris by Night, but even more con-
cretely, many directors bring their media connections with these variety shows
(and their proximity to Hollywood) to Vietnam as they work within a tight net-
work of writers, actors, editors, and producers that hail from similar backgrounds.
The film’s casting of diasporic singer/actor/model Ngô Thanh Vân, whose family
moved to Norway when she was ten and who has since returned to Vietnam to
pursue an acting career, only secures the linkages between the diasporic entertain-
ment industry and contemporary Vietnamese cinema.
The spectacularization of Ngô’s body in House is also similar to how the female
body in the variety show performs as a spectacle. In the film, however, the female
body is overtly sexualized (at one point she dances nude in the rain) and yet
highly abject, performing mostly as a vessel for the angry spirits that inhabit
it. The film establishes the duality of female abjection and the objectification of
the female body from the beginning. Having moved into a house in the alley,
Thành (Tr^an Baœo So’n) and Thaœo (Ngô Thanh Vân) are newlyweds and expecting
a child. Marked by dramatic lighting and canted angles, the first scenes of the film
are meant to be horrific: during a violent thunderstorm, Thaœo undergoes labor
and miscarries the baby. This bloody introduction emphasizes how her miscar-
riage is the kernel of a trauma that will haunt the would-be mother throughout the
film. Soon after, amid the clutter of their new home, she tries to cope with her
baby’s death. Haunted by this loss, Thaœo keeps the corpse in the couple’s bed-
room and is later possessed by the vengeful ghosts residing in the home. In
Lucy Fischer’s words, the film traffics in fears coalescing around motherhood
and “birth traumas,” signaling the ways that horror films seek to foreground
women’s experience but also “appropriat[e] the quotidian” (425).
To be sure, the horrifying figure of the unborn child is found in many US films
and trades on the promise and dread for the future that children represent.12 But
such fears about the unborn are also entrenched in Southeast Asian religious and
supernatural beliefs around notions of karma and animism. Analyzing the block-
buster Thai film Nang Nak (1999), Adam Knee explains that local folklore beliefs
articulate a fear in the “ghost of a woman [who] has died during childbirth” (141).
Resulting from a violent death, this kind of ghost is called a pii dtai tang krom and
can be doubly horrifying because the act of birthing has led to the deaths of both
mother and child. As Panivong Norindr underscores in his study of the Lao hor-
ror film Chantaly (2013), the predominance of beliefs in spirits (or phi) for
Laotians provides a framework of living for the living; they “affect the way people
relate to nature, understand illness and misfortune, and shapes interpersonal
161
 Duong

relationships” (36). In both cases, as Knee and Norindr separately note, woman’s
reproductive labor can be a source of dread and inspiration.
In House, however, labor contains an added charge since Thành struggles with
labor problems at his company. The specters haunting postsocialist Vietnam are

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the workers whose value as laborers has been resignified in the country’s move to
globalize the economy in recent years. As faceless laborers, they nonetheless rep-
resent a narrative force, revolting and staging a strike at Thành’s factory and
menacing the familial space with the threat of chaos and disruption.
Throughout House, Thành is, in fact, torn between his wife and his job: while
tending to his sick wife, he must also deal with his ailing company. Ultimately,
he falls short in maintaining order in the private (home) or public (workplace)
sphere, even as his subordinate, Minh, attempts to explain to him that these
spaces necessarily bleed into one another. Thành’s mother evinces the same point
of view but renders this pronouncement more ominously; she exhorts him to gov-
ern with power, keeping both his wife and his workers under control and imply-
ing that if either goes unchecked, Thành’s masculinity is at stake.
If the film thematizes patriarchy’s failure (and women’s complicity in it) to
manage the household in a time when Vietnam embraces global capitalism, it also
reveals how postsocialist modernity has a grave problem with memory, which
presents a thornier issue. The upwardly mobile couple is stricken with not only
grief but also social amnesia; they are unaware of the deaths of children that have
occurred in their home before they moved into it. Tensions are heightened further
when the audience learns that the film’s setting—the titular house in the alley—
was the site of an orphanage where young children were killed in a tragic fire
years ago. The couple finds themselves, therefore, among the undead against a
volatile context of labor unrest and rapid urbanization. Thành and Thaœo are pun-
ished for neither knowing their home’s history nor reconciling with its past life
before they work to reconstruct it.
House cites Vietnam’s traumatic past and its mode of globalization as the root
of the problem. It poses the question of why contemporary Saigon may be the
place for the unhousing of restless spirits. As the country’s center for capitalistic
development today, the city may be hailed by another name (Ho Chi Minh City),
but as the film’s setting, Saigon also obliquely refers to an unseemly past of dec-
adence and corruption prior to the state’s forced economic and political rehabil-
itation.13 An intermingling of different temporalities thus inhabits the cityscape.
Erik Harms makes this point but in another context; he discusses the city’s recent
plans for urbanization, including a large complex of housing in one of its major
districts. This project has created a certain sense of restlessness among some of
its inhabitants as 14,600 working-class residents must grapple with eventually
being evicted from their homes; they experience a ruptured sense of temporality
as a result (345). As Harms explains, these forced evacuations gesture toward a

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complex architecture of past dislocations and present disruptions for the

displaced. He describes this population:
Residents already displaced and those soon-to-be displaced include recent migrants
with tenuous land rights, multigenerational families whose ancestors have lived in

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the area since before the French colonial era, residents from before 1975 whose land
papers still bear the stamps of the old “Saigon regime” and former revolutionary
soldiers and “heroic mothers” whose homes are decorated with certificates cele-
brating their valor in the war against the Americans. (345)
Along similar lines, anthropologist Christina Schwenkel elaborates on the feeling
of discontent and disaffection so pervasive in a time in which “state support has
withered and forced evictions have increased” (257). The disenchantment with
and the desires for state care and belonging are what she refers to as “postsocialist
affect,” which names the apprehension and uncertainty experienced by those
whose homes are targeted by investors for “renewal” (257). House manifests these
affects as anxieties in the film’s evocation of the loss of “socialist care” for those
left behind in modernity’s project. A liminal space (as most haunted houses are in
ghost films), the “house in the alley” refers at once to the ruins of Vietnam’s col-
lectivization program and present-day project of urbanization, which aims to
reconstruct space with rapidity and without regard for time, place, and history.
As the film details, managing a house after a time of socialist housing is an
especially estranging enterprise for women. Without family or friends in the city,
Thaœo becomes the most receptive body for the dead to occupy. From the start,
Thaœo not only mourns the death of a child but also the absence of familial and
communal ties in the urban space. Residing in the city further compounds her
discontentment and loneliness, emphasized in a scene that features her and a
longtime girlfriend talking at cross-purposes with one another against the cold
blue angles of the cityscape. As a mirror to this setting, the “house in the alley,”
with its color palette of blues and greens, symbolizes the downside of globaliza-
tion for the female subject of modernity. Gendered forms of alterity in the film
only exacerbate the haunting. Because she is someone who joins the patrilineal
family in the city, Thaœo stands outside of this family. (In Vietnamese this position
of liminality is linguistically signified; the mother’s side of the family is called
: or outside, whereas the paternal family is n^
ngo ai, o: i, or inside.) She does not
belong to any community in the film, and neither does her mother-in-law wel-
come her into the space of the patriarchal family.
That Thaœo is not able to produce a (male) heir to the family only aggravates the
tenuous position she holds in it. Studying selective reproduction through the
“haunting images” of sonography, Tine Gammeltoft argues that daughters-in-
law feel a particular sense of burden in coming into the husband’s family because
“their belonging [is] contingent on their ability to live up to social expectations.”
In a context in which Confucian values of patrilineage are predominant, for

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women, “childbearing [becomes] a critical moral test.” As Gammeltoft powerfully

contends, not bearing a child commits a grave offense against the family qua
nation. She writes that in Vietnam, “a complete child body affirms the capacities
of parents (particularly mothers) for practical care, while also attesting to their
moral integrity in a cosmological sense, indicating that they and their ancestors

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have lived in proper ways” (233). Proper womanhood, as Gammeltoft finds, roots
itself in bearing a healthy, able-bodied child, a future laborer that would live up to
its working potential in a globalizing Vietnam.
While House conjures conventional images of female reproduction and abjec-
tion often found in Asian horror films, the themes of the film converge with a
great degree of specificity and emphasis. It is important that present-day
Saigon constitutes the setting for the film, which deals with the specter of capi-
talism in a postsocialist era. Using the city as the burial ground for dead children,
the film raises the issue of history in questioning the sacrifices that have been
made for the sake of Vietnam’s economy. As much as it deals with property,
the film also ruminates on gendered notions of propriety for those subjects
who are located inside (n^o: i) and outside (ngo ai): the national family, for whom
the reproduction of ideology and its citizenry—the “heroic mother” of nationalist
lore—is rooted in the figure of the woman, a mother who sacrifices multiple sons
to fight for the country. As Hue-Tam Ho Tai notes of the recent commemorations
of this figure in Vietnam, “focusing on the extraordinary losses suffered by the
Heroic Mothers could—and occasionally did—lead to a questioning of the
human costs of war” (180). House registers a similar ambivalence; the film fea-
tures the female protagonist as an alien subject of Vietnamese nationalist moder-
nity. She can neither reproduce the ideology of capital nor bear children properly,
and yet, she remains a portal through which the dead, or the undesirable under-
class of Vietnamese society, express their discontents. Without narrative resolu-
tion, the film offers a spectral portrait of the national family, one in which the wife
is neither living nor dead, and the stillborn child, unbeknownst to the father,
resides with them even as the couple moves out of the house in the alley.

The Afterlife of the Nation and its Diaspora

Remarking on Vietnamese modernity and the question of neoliberalism, Li Zhang
argues that for countries such as China and Vietnam, a “flexible postsocialism”
appears to be in place, “one marked by selective incorporation of such neoliberal
strategies as the devolution of state power, governing from afar, self-governing,
and optimization in diverse domains beyond the marketplace” (661). Of the term
postsocialism, Zhang makes clear that it is not fixed as a mode of periodization
whereby the prefix post- signifies a time period after socialism. Rather, she uses
“this term to refer to conditions of transformation and articulation of socialist and
nonsocialist practices and logics regardless of the official labeling of the state.” As
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she states, such “flexible assemblages with their own characteristics have not
diminished but rather strengthened the authoritarian rule of the party-state”
(661). Zhang’s formulation of flexible postsocialism aligns with the Vietnamese
state’s renovated strategies of inclusion toward its diaspora. In its making,

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House in the Alley signals and critiques the modes of “socialism from afar” that
Zhang states are particular to Vietnam; the film deals with a formerly repressed
subject in national culture and is produced by the children of the country’s former
Others. Seeing ghosts as figures of critique is in keeping with Bliss Cua Lim’s res-
onant work on temporality in ghost films. She suggests that “ghost narratives pro-
ductively explore the dissonance between modernity’s disenchanted time and the
spectral temporality of haunting in which the presumed boundaries between past,
present, and future are shown to be shockingly permeable” (288). Lim argues for
an understanding of ghosts that asserts a “radicalized accountability to those who
are no longer with us, a solidarity with specters made possible by remembering”
(319).
Scholars in Vietnamese American studies similarly contend that the ghost
serves as a critical force in narratives of progress and telos. “Ghosts of war” in
this context of writing and criticism signify a past and a present that must be con-
tinually apprehended and mourned. In the fiction of Vietnamese diasporic
writers, as Thu-Hu’o’ng Nguy~ ^en-Võ argues, mourning is an ever-present task
for the living. She states that loss is rewritten in terms of an “interrupted history
of the South, the death of its nation” (6). The nation’s promise and its demise
remains a source of melancholia in a literature that mourns the loss of the former
South, which has been dispossessed of its “promise of colonial sovereignty and
thus the loss of the life force itself” (10). Analyzing minority literature on the
Vietnam War, Viet Thanh Nguyen observes that much “of the writing, art, and
politics of Vietnamese refugees, is about the problem of mourning the dead,
remembering the missing, and considering the place of the survivors in the move-
ment of history” (8). Given these acts of commemoration in the rewriting of stor-
ies as history, Y ^en Lê Espiritu further posits that scholars must become
storytellers of ghosts themselves in order to “pay attention to what modern
history has rendered ghostly and to write into being the settling presence of
the things that appear to be not there” (xix). For her, ghostly retellings are part
of a critical and ethical effort “to remember the lost and missing subjects of his-
tory” (xx).
Creating ghost films in contemporary Vietnam, Vietnamese American direc-
tors draw on a highly commercial genre, one that productively opens a space
for the exploration of the themes of the repressed once considered taboo in
Vietnamese culture. Reading ghost films as a “critical effort to remember the lost
and missing” (Espiritu xx) may also be a generative and productive gesture. For
what the making of ghost films in Vietnam reveals is the postsocialist context
from which they are produced; this body of work shows the present-day cultural
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seams of a state that tries to govern neoliberally. While allowing for more films of
different genres to be produced and distributed, the state continues to restrict
subject matter. Portrayals of the war, re-education camps, and the plight of ref-
ugees are still subject to censorship.

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Against such strictures, films such as House in the Alley are part of the reim-
agining of the nation’s afterlife in which diasporic returns are essential to the
country’s filmmaking infrastructure. These returns point to Vietnam’s mode of
spectral nationalism, or the process by which the Other is at once inhibited
and ingested by the state. At the same time that the Vietnamese state tries to
efface the presence of a diasporic past in official narratives, it also embraces dia-
sporic capital in the contemporary era. While the state legislates the production of
diasporic culture and movement of diasporic subjects in the country’s borders, it
also seeks to cannibalize diasporic cultural production, in effect living on the
labor of those whose families were cast out of the nation in the post-1975 era.
By the same token, the spectral also makes visible the lingering presence of
the South Vietnamese who return to demand a role in the cultural and economic
life of the nation today. In its making and content, House in the Alley invokes the
notion of diasporic returns to underline what is both absent and present in the
ways the nation-state manages its cultural identity and borders under globaliza-
tion. Through the process of spectral nationalism, the trace of the diaspora man-
ifests itself in the making of a (trans)national Vietnamese culture today.

Notes
1. For Mai Lan Gustafsson, Vietnam’s undead is a rich site of inquiry. “Postwar
Vietnam,” she argues, “is a house that has suffered a death in the family and
the dead have returned” (57). Ann Marie Leshkowich analyzes the trope of wan-
dering ghosts in everyday discourse among female traders in the South who use
the “wandering ghost metaphor to describe how loyal-cadres-turned ghosts have
little choice but to prey on the traders” (8). As she notes, the metaphor of wan-
dering ghosts for Vietnam southerners illustrates that “daily life is sinister” (8)
and the ways in which “ghosts figure in contemporary Viet Nam as a way to talk
about the consequences of the war” (9). Heonik Kwon contends that ghosts are
vital to the living and acts of storytelling; ghosts are not just harbingers of the past
but actors in the making of a sociocultural narrative about grief and accountabil-
ity. For the storyteller, relaying the power of ghosts is a “powerful, effective
means of historical reflection and self-expression” (2).
2. I borrow this term from Avery F. Gordon’s influential book on ghosts, Ghostly
Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (1997).
3. One of the first films made in Vietnam was the ghost film Cánh D - ^ong Ma (Field of
Ghosts) (1937). Subsequent films about ghosts are few and far between, with sev-
eral films having been made in South Vietnam during the war with the Americans

166
 Diasporic Returns

- á (Tears of Stone) (1971) by Võ

and shortly after the war ended: they are L^e: D
-Doàn Châu, Con Ma Nhà Ho: Hu’ a (The Hua Family Ghost) (1972) by Lê
Hoàng Hoa, and Ngôi Nhà Oan Kh ^oc (House of Gross Injustices) (1992) by Lê
M^o: ng Hoàng.

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4. For Jacques Derrida, the trace embodies the notion of différance and is the mark
of the occult. He writes:

The trace, where the relationship with the other is marked, articulates its pos-
sibility in the entire field of the entity [étant], which metaphysics has defined as
the being-present starting from the occulted movement of the trace. The trace
must be thought before the entity. But the movement of the trace is necessarily
occulted, it produces itself as self-occultation. When the other announces itself
as such, it presents itself in the dissimulation of itself. (47)

5. KCET, Los Angeles, broadcast a segment, “With Reverse Migration, Children of

Immigrants Chase ‘American Dream’ Abroad” (2013), about Asian immigrants
who return to Asia to live and work.
6. This resolution is known as the Politburo Resolution No. 36 NQ/TW (26 March
2004). As Christian Collet and Hiroko Furuya contend, “This was the first reso-
lution by the Politburo of the [Commumist Party of Vietnam] on the subject,
making it a more meaningful and powerful statement in the context of
Vietnamese domestic politics” (70).
7. In his essay, “Saigon from the Diaspora” (2008), Ashley Carruthers studies the
ways that diasporic representations of Saigon are not merely made up of nostal-
gic images, arguing that the reception of these images, in fact, varies, depending
on age and gender.
8. In 2013, Bu: i D- o’ i Cho:’ Lo’ n (Dust of Life in Cholon) was leaked on the Internet.
Directed by the most popular Vietnamese American filmmaker working in
Vietnam today, Charlie Nguyen, the film was initially banned from exhibiting
in the country and outside its borders because of its images of gang violence
and the ineffective role of police authorities featured in the film. After this deba-
cle, the film was pirated and can now be purchased in Vietnamese American
community enclaves, such as in Orange County, and on the streets in Saigon.
9. The phrase “Viet Film Wave” was used in Californian newspapers to describe a
group of young Vietnamese Americans (some of whom are mixed race) who
immigrated to the United States after the fall of Saigon and have been working
on films with one another since the beginnings of their film careers. They include
Ham Tran (Journey from the Fall [2006]), Stephane Gauger (The Owl and the
Sparrow [2009]), Victor Vu (Blood Letter [2012]), and Charlie Nguyen (The
Rebel [2007]). See Richard Chang and My-Thuan Tran.
10. The Vietnamese diaspora also call this day and the events that commemorate the
“fall” of Saigon “Black April” or, in Vietnamese, Ngày Qu^oc H^a: n, which translates

167
 Duong

as “National Day of Resentment.” In Vietnam, however, this day is referred to as

the “Liberation of Saigon” or Ngày Giaœi Phóng Saigon.
11. OC Weekly ran a five-page article on the possible demise of variety shows such as
Paris by Night (Kornhaber). On Paris by Night, my observations have been sharp-
ened by the readings on gender and performance in the work of Nhi Lieu, Kieu-

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Linh Caroline Valverde, and Thuy Vo Dang.
12. Vivian Sobchack argues that the horror and science fiction genres come together
in the family melodrama, wherein the child represents both past and future and
indicates through their acts of terror “patriarchy’s decline” (153).
13. Philip Taylor writes that South Vietnam after 1975 was to be “treated with the
same caution . . . reserved for unexploded mines, toxic chemical dumps, or other
dangerous military ordnance. Cities, consumer lifestyles, markets and pop music
tapes were not viewed as indices of South Vietnam’s encounter with modernity,
but as dangerous threats” (32).

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