Posted on October 5, 2010 by Mary Catherine
The Theory
In Viet Thanh Nguyen‘s article “Representing Reconciliation : Le Ly Hayslip and the Victimized Body,” the author discusses the work of Hayslip, a Vietnamese woman who now lives in America and has written autobiographies of her experiences surrounding the Vietnam War. Nguyen argues that Hayslip’s authenticity as a person affected by the Vietnam War is dependent on her body as a victim. The “victim’s body” or “body-in-evidence” (608) is traditionally used in American discourse as a silent example which both sides of an argument can use for their own agenda ; for example, Nguyen explains how photographs and testimonies published of the My Lai massacre were used by antiwar individuals to show the horrors of the Vietnam War, but were also claimed, by those who supported the war, to be subjective and inaccurate depictions, which led many Americans to believe the massacre did not happen.
Hayslip’s books are considered significant because she does not allow herself to be used as a silent victim, but rather positions herself to be “a speaker and a spokesperson for the living and the dead” (608), when previously there was no Vietnamese perspective considered in American discourse about the war.
Hayslip uses her body as a “victim’s body” to fulfill a role imposed upon her by Americans as a person who experienced the war in Vietnam, and one that she assigns herself to authenticate her views and connect herself to her Vietnamese readers. Nguyen defines Hayslip’s role as a victim’s body as between “representation” and “reconciliation ;” she tries to represent herself as a symbolic figure of a woman affected by life in a third-world country, while also using her personal experiences as a victim of war to “reconcile the United States and Viet Nam, but also to reconcile herself to other overseas Vietnamese who perceive her as whore, traitor, and self-promoter” (610).
According to Nguyen, representation occurs on two levels : on a micrological level, a person speaks on their own experiences ; on a macrological level, a person speaks on behalf of a group of people. In Oliver Stone’s film Heaven and Earth, based on Hayslip’s book When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, an emblematic victim is used, meaning there is one person whose personal experience stands for the collective experience of all their people. The “representative” and “represented” are the same.
Nguyen argues that Hayslip is a good choice for a representational speaker because she is exceptional among women in third-world countries, namely because of the political and economic importance of Vietnam to America. However, writer Trang Hoang, in reviewing Hayslip’s book When Heaven and Earth Changed Places in Amerasia Journal, comments that readers “need to remind [themselves] that this is only one person’s experience and cannot be representative of the collective.The book is a chronicle of Hayslip’s extraordinary life. It does not portray the life of an average Vietnamese citizen” (qtd. in Soderstrom). Unlike Nguyen, Hoang believes that the exceptional nature of Le Ly Hayslip’s life should discount her from being a representational speaker for all Vietnamese people.
Hayslip equates her body with nature and the land ; by becoming a symbol of land, Hayslip can suggest that her physical healing from from events like her rape at the hands of the Viet Cong or the abuse she receives from her American husband stands in for the healing of all of Vietnam.
Hayslip also includes an idealized femininity in her books, which draws on the traditional virtue of chastity for Vietnamese women. Nguyen relates the historical Vietnamese poem Truyen Kieu (“The Tale of Kieu”), also mentioned in Catfish and Mandala, to Hayslip’s use of a personal account to exemplify the values of Vietnam as a whole. Hayslip follows the form of the tale of Kieu by renouncing relationships with men in order to help others and bring about reconciliation between the United States and Vietnam, as well as herself and both countries for their roles in making her a victim.
The Theory in Practice
The idea of the victim’s body being used in American society shows up often in popular culture, in the guise of the emblematic victim, as described in the article in relation to Oliver Stone’s film Heaven and Earth. Another movie I thought of was Life is Beautiful (in Italian, La Vita è Bella), in which actor Roberto Benigni’s character Guido is sent to a concentration camp ; his personal narrative as a victim stands in for the experience of all Jews who were forced to do the same during the Holocaust.
While this example fits with Nguyen’s concept of representation on a micro- and macrological level, the movie does not deal with reconciliation. Catfish and Mandala, though perhaps not as obviously positioning Pham as a representative of all survivors of the Vietnam War, does discuss the idea of reconciliation between Vietnam and the United States. This is particularly evident in the monologue spoken by Uncle Tu to Pham :
No, I do not hate the American soldiers. Who are they ? They were boys, as I was. They were themselves, but also part of a greater creature — the government. As was I. I can no more blame them than a fish I eat can be blamed for what I do… There is nothing to forgive. There is no hate in this land. No hate in my heart. (267)
Source : http://aalitandmc.wordpress.com/201...
Additional Resources
Interview with Le Ly Hayslip :
Part 1 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilgT...
Part 2 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsIN...
Part 3 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY8s...
Part 4 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4dj...
Part 5 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMyz...
Part 6 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSUL...
PBS’s American Experience page, Vietnam Online : http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/vietna...
Soderstrom, Christina K. “Le Ly Hayslip.” Voices from the Gaps. The University of Minnesota, 1997. Web. 5 October 2010 : http://voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpag...