Hanoi as Heterotopia
In this latest entry of Text, the author of in illo tempore lingers on the shifting layers of past and present that weave through the city. How does one see while being seen, move while being moved, stitch fleeting impressions into something that holds, if only for a moment? What emerges in the space between presence and absence, when the city becomes both a mirror and a labyrinth, reflecting and refracting the self in ways both familiar and estranging? When a step forward becomes a glance back, when impressions blur, entwine, and unravel—where does one begin, and where does one belong?
Hanoi as Heterotopia
‘We tell you the truth: there are no fortunate islands.’
Ernest Dowson, “The Fortunate Islands”
It was once easier—obligatory even—for diasporic authors to write about Hanoi. The trope was among the first to emerge during the Republican era and proved to be among the few of such topoi to survive well into what we may now regard as a bygone era of post-75 diasporic literature. Hanoi’s toponymic charm has even exerted its conspicuous influence in the realm of Vietnamese-American literature. Quite unexpectedly, Hanoi occupies a prominent place in multiple Vietnamese-American memoirs, many of which were penned by authors of ostensibly non-Hanoian extraction. Andrew X. Pham’s Catfish and Mandala is an early example. Nguyen Qui-Duc, in his latter years, was a personification of the Viet-Kieu-turned-Hanoian. I would ordinarily here insert a rhetorical question interrogating the origin of this abiding enthrallment with an abstraction (not a “city”—at least not one in the concrete) so seemingly removed from the historical experience of diasporic Vietnamese literature: yet here too am I. It is absurd to posture such cerebral detachment while well within the belly of the beast.
For the previous generation of diasporic writers, Hanoi was the final destination on the retour au pays natal. The ultimate frontier, it functioned as a liminal interstice situated between the romance of the homecoming tour and the cruder realities of exilic peregrination to which one would imminently return. If any insight—any truth—was to be discerned regarding one’s Vietnamese identity, it was in this rite of passage. Only in Hanoi was the diasporic mark of Cain made manifest, and its efficacy put to the test. There, in that umbrous vale, each was to meet with his or her unique entourage of aborigines. The nature of these interlocutors is worthy of note. In isolation, each appears possessed of some fantastical singularity bordering caricature and archetype. Vuong, the mysterious pearl artisan in Nguyen Minh-Nuu’s “The Fourth Hanoi,” is a phantasmagorical avatar conjured from Nguyễn Tuân’s neo-medieval pastiche. In Le-Thi Hue’s experimental novel, The Sulking Cry of the Flesh, the protagonist Lan-Huong is led through a labyrinth of sweaty bodies and corroded antiques by Lady Thanh, a Virgilian guide all but assimilated into the basso loco to which she has been exiled. The true nature of these motley characters is revealed, albeit hintingly, only from afar. Divorced from the particulars by which they have been idiosyncratically tailored to their wards, they are but so many shades and specters bound to a common haunt. At the end of the road, one was greeted by these strange psychopomps. It was they who divulged, if only in part, the secrets of Hanoi and imparted a sense of finality to the grueling journey. Seldom did this bring closure. Rather, it was accepted with a sort of cathartic resignation to ambiguity: once its purgatorial dimensions were revealed, the itinerary which brought one to Hanoi was no longer a pilgrimage to the place, but only through it. To whither, one knew not.
Hanoi then is (or rather was) the heterotopic Mecca of the Vietnamese diaspora. There, the diasporic writer could confront, and thereby transcend, his or her exilic identity. For some, this entailed a meeting with the ultimate political other. Such meetings usually occasioned a quiet realization of the inadequacy of the trite terms with which diasporic discourse had self-enforced false binaries between reconciliation and ressentiment. For others, the Hanoian voyage represented a primordial return to the wellspring of personal and national identity. The imagined ressourcement was inevitably frustrated by the fragmentation and denuded brutality of the present. A certain world-weary solemnity was lent to the voices of those who weathered the transformative pilgrimage. They spoke, no longer from behind enemy lines, but rather, as it were, from the edges of the oikumene. Having traversed the imagined politico-cultural cosmos, they could finally dispel what lingering fantasies remained possible for those whose return to the old country was limited to spellbound circumambulations centered on Saigon. Guided by various psychopomps, they made their way through the sprawling necropolis of memory and gradually embraced their final disembodiment from the land of the living. The allure of solipsistic nostalgia and its attendant pretensions dissipated. The spell was broken. It was only in these writers—and even then, only in choice passages of rare lucidity—that the paradoxical absurdity of the diasporic condition was brought to light: they were exiles, but they no longer knew from what. And so, they returned again to foreign shores, only now as to their native harbor.
Though many would deny it, this is all, in my estimation, a thing of the past. Today, to speak of Hanoi in such hallowed terms betrays a wooly mawkishness absolvable only for the hoary and decrepit. I have little interest in elaborating or defending the argument: to do so merely drags one back into an inane cycle of cloying affectation and sterile speculation. It is far more fruitful to ask how this has come to pass and what implications it may harbor for the historically conscious writer. The answer is, in fact, quite plain and—for that reason—all the more embarrassing. To put it simply, the illusion of heterotopia could be maintained only so long as Hanoi remained a static whole in the imagination of the diaspora. (Indeed, this prerequisite explains why Saigon did not offer a similarly heterotopic escape: no such fantasies could be entertained in a place whose very name revealed the vicissitudes of fortune.) For decades, its denizens were summoned but briefly from the shadows, and even then, primarily as foils whose limited mobility and suppressed personality served to highlight and confirm the exile’s comparative agency. Perhaps this smug and self-Orientalizing tendency was more tenable in bygone years (or at least less patently crass). Nowadays, it is tasteless—and manifestly so, as is attested by the contemporary absence of such hackneyed descriptions from all but the most banal of diasporic authors writing on Hanoi. We have realized, inexcusably late, that those whom we have treated as backdrops to our own self-centered narratives possess equal agency in their respective discourse. (Have they, in fact, possessed it all along?)
Hence, by and large, Hanoi has awkwardly disappeared as a topos in contemporary diasporic literature. The escapist allure of Hanoi has been obliterated. Accompanying the refashioning of the city into an apish simulacrum of the Global North was the gradual compromise of its monumentality as a symbol of tradition. For the diasporic writer, this is a discombobulating inversion of the time-honored dynamics by which Hanoi was defined and experienced as a heterotopic immersion in the mythopoetic Vietnamese past. It is now the natives of Hanoi who perpetuate this mystique. But this is possible only through a quiet eschewal of the schizophrenic triumphalism which characterized the dominant tenor of certain discursive patterns deeply associated with Hanoian exceptionalism. Rather than outright disown this problematic heritage, astute and self-aware Hanoian literati have subtly readjusted their goût to favor more nuanced works. Inevitably, this led them to authors such as Dương Nghiễm Mậu and Thanh Tâm Tuyền. Even the rather obscure antebellum antiquarian Nhuong Tong has seen something of a revival. In other words: the demarcations which for decades divided diasporic and Hanoian literati have utterly collapsed. Not only has the refined Hanoian writer read and digested the authors which diaspora once claimed as its own, the literary mentalité has also shifted to such an extent that it is now possible to divest a significant corpus of wartime literature of its political baggage. Although they remain a minority, this dedicated contingent of readers and writers has already begun the rehabilitation of certain authors and works into the Vietnamese canon. In other words: they have taken over the diaspora’s job and are, in many aspects, accomplishing more than has ever been possible from the polemical stance traditionally assumed by diasporic writers. The players have changed, but the tune remains uncannily familiar.
Bizarrely, this confluence of native and diasporic discourse has not supplanted the heterotopic potential of Hanoi. It is as if Hanoians, having become aware that they inhabit a heterotopia, are in increasing need of delineating and multiplying heterotopic bubbles in miniature with mind to escape from the Escape. Hence the proliferation of innumerable cafés, musical joints, bookstores, and other exclusive spaces, each peddling its own anodyne reprieve from the city and culture at large. So pervasive are these micro-heterotopias that one can experience a convincing interlude for the duration of a taxi ride or a dinner, provided one knows which providers or venues to seek. Ironically, a truly heterotopic experience of contemporary Hanoi entails immersion in these ever-multiplying micro-heterotopias. The otherness of Hanoi now experienced is not that of the wholly other, but of the familiar—reharmonized and modulated into a distant key. Among the more curious of the contemporary micro-heterotopias which dot Hanoi is Quan Cam, a small café tucked away in a dilapidated public housing unit. Its location and interior decor are immediately recognizable as quintessentially and self-consciously Hanoian. Its popular live music series, while not without considerable variety, is primarily focused on popular music from the wartime South and the diaspora. Numerous bookstores, each with its entourage of devoted regulars, offer similar experiences centered around the literature of South Vietnam and the diaspora. Here we have an example of the ultimate inverted micro-heterotopia. Divested of their original politico-cultural connotations, select fragments of diasporic discourse are reduced to cultural commodity, exchanged and displayed as tokens of initiation into a uniquely Hanoian underground. Whereas the Hanoian tour of the diasporic wanderer was once treated as the final stretch into pseudo-religious transcendence, the contemporary Hanoian enters a sanitized bubble of diasporic experience to emerge a savvier urbanite. The inversion is thus made complete.
It is difficult to write about Hanoi. Or rather, writing about Hanoi has become—at least for me—practically indistinguishable from treating any other topic or place. Surrounded and immersed in its micro-heterotopias, I consider a great deal of my recent work to be inspired by my experience of Hanoi, if not—if I may be so bold—Hanoian. In an even more curious variation on the old diasporic theme, I find myself oddly inspired and acclimated to the city. For all the wrong reasons.
Nguyễn Thụy-Đan
Published as part of our series La vie est ailleurs, pourvu que je soit un autre, this text contributes to a broader reflection on the fragile interplay of languages, spaces, and identities, tracing lines of formation where words meet their edges, where boundaries dissolve at the very moment of crystallization.
Dương Nghiễm Mậu: The Age of Poisonous Water
