Source: Kristen Pelzer, “Socio-Cultural Dimensions of Renovation in Vietnam: Doi Moi as Dialogue and Transformation in Gender Relations” in William S. Turley and Mark Selden (editors), Reinventing Vietnamese Socialism: Doi Moi in Comparative Perspective (Routledge, 1993), pages 309-333.

Excerpt from the Article

This excerpt is posted here for the way its discussion of a short work of fiction highlighted several features of post-war Vietnam during the initial years of its doi moi reform period. As the short story The General Retires illustrates, many in Vietnam, as early as 1987, had mixed emotions about the transition toward a political and economic system modeled on the new China and other Southeast Asian economies. Discussion after the excerpt.

ABSTRACT

This chapter looks at an important socio-cultural sphere in transition: changing images of Vietnamese women, and transformations in gender relations during new period in Vietnamese history. Vietnam’s history of openness to incorporating and adapting aspects of foreign cultures is as rich and varied as its ‘closed,’ defensive tradition of resisting foreign domination by China, France, and then the United States. A primary object of renovation is the Vietnamese Communist Party which has been renewing itself both organizationally and ideologically in order to lead fundamental systemic reforms. While the main impetus is economic and political, Vietnam’s present growing economic openness to international market forces, as well as the transition to market rather than state-controlled exchange of goods within the country, has profound implications for social relations. The new policy of displaying feminine smiles and female bodies serves as advertisement for the new Vietnam.

The Cash Nexus and Its Discontents: Cherchez La Femme?

In The General Retires,^[1] a short story by Nguyen Huy Thiep, a young male Hanoi civil servant who has emerged as one of Vietnam’s most popular and controversial writers, the replacement of revolutionary morality with the logic of the market and economic calculation is symbolized by a female character.

In this story, the character of the male narrator is a mix of tradition and modernity. He prides himself on his professional job (as an engineer working at the Physics Institute), and his harmonious marriage to a “modern woman”, a professional in her own right, a doctor. However, this modern woman also has all the virtues of a traditional Vietnamese wife who takes full responsibility both for childcare and for raising money to augment their salaries. “Thuy knew a lot about running a household [this does not include housework, all of which is done by two servants] and raising children. As for me, I saw myself as rather conservative, unpredictable, and maladroit.” While there are universal elements in this sexual division of labor within the household (childcare as women’s work), the pattern of dependable, financially astute wife and unpredictable husband is an old Vietnamese and Southeast Asian stereotype. Traditionally, in Vietnam, the wife’s financial responsibility for the family leaves the husband free to study and/or play.

The narrator combines elements of old-fashioned patriarchal mentality with modern egalitarian attitudes. His strongest tie is to his father, the “retired general” of the title. Before his retirement,

My father was never there. From time to time, he came to the house, but his visits were always very brief. The letters that he sent were also brief, but, between the lines, I felt his love and his concern for us. I am the only son. I owe everything to him. Thanks to him, I have a chance to get an education and go abroad. He also took responsibility for the material life of the family.

Thanks to his father the general, the family lived in a large villa on the outskirts of Hanoi; thanks to his wife’s enterprise in mobilizing and directing—i.e., exploiting—the labor of a father and daughter whom she look in as servants and put to work on sideline money-making activities along with household chores, the family has abundant cash and he can smoke expensive cigarettes. This harmonious traditional plus modern marriage is disrupted by the appearance in the household of the narrator’s father, the recently retired general of the title. The newcomer is shocked by his son’s wife’s values and by her way of running the household. A morality drama ensues, with the son caught between the combination of traditional and revolutionary values embodied in the father, on the one hand, and the values of the market and monetary calculation embodied in his wife, on the other. She embodies a calculating approach which turns everything into money and reckons all social obligations in monetary terms. However, as the wife in Vietnam has long had the primary financial role, this image of woman as hard-eyed calculator looking at the bottom line has elements of tradition as well as capitalist modernity.

The text seems to play with the contrast and conflict between the father as retired (i.e., obsolete) military general and the wife as main center of power in the household, the “general of the interior.” The father embodies both the strengths and weaknesses of the che doi moi, the socialist system which emerged from the revolution but which has now become obsolete. His values are egalitarian. The faults of the socialist system in which connections rather than cash grease the wheels of the system are treated indulgently by the narrator, but not by the narrator’s wife.

Though retired, he received many visitors. That astonished me and made me happy. My wife said: “Don’t be too pleased. They only want to ask him for favors. Don’t go out of your way too much for them, father.” My father smiled: “It’s nothing. I’m only writing some letters. Like this one: ‘Dear N., commander of... zone. I write this letter, etc. After more than 50 years, this is the first time that I celebrate the third day of the third month under the roof of my own house. When we were at the front, the two of us, sometimes we dreamed, etc. Do you remember the hamlet at the side of the road? Miss Hue made cakes with moldy glutinous rice flour. She had flour on her back, etc. I take this occasion to inform you that Mr...., who is one of my acquaintances, wishes to serve under your command, etc.’ Is that okay?” I said: “Yes, that’s okay.” My wife said: ‘That’s not okay.’ My father scratched his chin. “They’re only asking me for a favor.”

Until his supply ran out, he puts the letters in official Ministry of Defense envelopes and gives them to the people asking for favors to mail. This petty working of an “old boy network” seems harmless to the reader (if not to the wife) as just a way for a retired man to maintain his contacts and his sense of social usefulness. The wife’s sins, denounced by the father, emerge as monumental in comparison. The narrator’s “deranged” mother—her life as the first to become obsolete and meaningless—has been banished to a small building behind the house. The servant, Miss Lai, plays the role of caring for her, which is traditionally the responsibility of the daughter-in-law. In fact, in a number of respects, Miss Lai can be seen as the distorted persona of “the good wife:” she is loyal, selfless, hardworking, uncomplaining, devoted, loving, asexual, and not very smart.

All of the retired general’s attempts to find a family role for himself are rejected. His granddaughters, precocious Hanoi school girls, reject his offer to read to them with a laugh and the statement that they do not have anything simple enough for him to read! He asks to help the servants with the animal husbandry, but his daughter-in-law (the narrator’s wife) rejects this as inappropriate for his status as a general.

The growing tension between father and wife comes to a head when the narrator’s father forces him to see his wife’s money-making activities for the household in a new light. The most important source of extra household revenues is raising dogs for sale; the retired general brings his son to see the food being prepared for the dogs.

My wife worked in the abortion department of the obstetrical clinic. Every day, she took the abandoned fetuses, put them in a thermos bottle with ice cubes, and brought them to the house. Mr. Co (the servant) cooked them for the dogs and the pigs. I did know about it but had not intervened because I didn’t think it important. My father led me into the kitchen to show me the pots in which the small pieces of fetus were floating. I remained silent. My father cried. He threw the thermos bottle at the sheep dogs. “Wretch!” he said, “I don’t need money that much.” My wife arrived and asked Mr. Co “Why didn’t you put them through the meat grinder? Why did you let him see?” Mr. Co responded: “I forgot. I’m sorry.”

This scene could be interpreted as a critique of exploitation comparable to the image of eating people in Lu Hsun’s A Madman’s Diary (Lu Hsun 1960). However, Nguyen Huy Thiep’s story specifically puts a woman in the role of the inhuman exploiter, not people in general. According to the Vietnamese ethnologist and women’s studies expert, Le Thi Nham Tuyet, the passage should not be interpreted as an indication of a “Right to Life” sentiment in Vietnam. The message is an attack on immoral ways of making money, not on abortion per se.

The narrator’s comfortable world gradually unravels. His mother falls, wastes away, and dies, and he blames himself for neglecting her. His coolly practical, dependable wife attracts the attention of a young neighbor named Khong, whom the children nickname “Khong Tu” (Confucius).

He worked in a nuoc mam (fish sauce cooperative), but he loved poetry. He wrote poems and sent them to Van Nghe. Khong was often at our house. He said, “Poetry, that’s what’s most sublime.” He read me Lorca, Whitman, etc. I did not like Khong. I suspected that he hung around our house for something more adventurous than poetry. One day 1 found a bunch of hand-written poems in my wife’s bed. She said to me: “Those are Khong’s poems. Have you read them?” I shook my head. “You’re getting old,” she said. Suddenly, I shuddered.

He did not lift a finger to get rid of his wife’s lover and even rejected the servant’s offer to beat up his rival. Distressed, he rode his scooter around the streets until he ran out of gas, then, while sitting dejected, was propositioned by “a young woman wearing make-up.” He just shook his head, no. It was the wife who finally kicked out the interloper after her lover made indecent advances to her teenage daughter. The narrator silently rejected his wife’s contrite and weeping lament, “I’ve wronged you and the children,” turning away with the thought that his daughter would have asked “Papa, are those crocodile tears?”

The male narrator is a passive spectator but also an accomplice in the rise of the logic of the market and the disintegration of family sentiments. He is the epitome of what Brown describes as the archetypical person of modern society, lacking in moral agency (Brown 1987).^[2] However, under the influence of his father, the narrator undergoes a return to traditional values, caring for his mother in her final illness, mourning deeply for her and following customary funeral practices which had been considered old-fashioned and superstitious by scientific socialism.

The retired general resolves his alienation from his son’s household by going to stay with old brothers-in-arms now stationed on the Chinese front at Cao Bang. On his death, the semi-fiction that he “died at the front” enables his old comrades to bury him with military honors. However, in the film version of the story, he dies of shock after meeting a prostitute on the streets of Hanoi. In the film version women are thus doubly symbolic of the moral degradation of society in the post-socialist era.

End of excerpt

This popular short story from the early days of reform shows that Vietnamese people were very unsettled by the new path the government had chosen. The disruptive nature of Vietnam’s economic reforms made many foreign observers conclude that Vietnam, like China, had gone entirely “capitalist” while retaining an “authoritarian” one-party rule. However, the new economic models of China and Vietnam forced people to eventually see that the socialist version of a market economy was based on neither the old notions of state capitalism nor on Western capitalism but rather on the features in the list below—superior because it goes to 11. The list may be an idealization, but it does describe the principles on which these countries operate. It breaks down the old communist-capitalist dichotomy and should force Westerners to simply say, to finish with a quote from an American work of fiction of the late 1980s, “I’ll have what she’s having.”

1. Currency is used as a public utility to fund essential projects and policies that bring people out of poverty and contribute to the greatest general welfare.

2. Banks are used as publicly owned utilities for the same purposes as above.

3. Agricultural land is owned collectively or cooperatively so that it cannot be neglected, abused and cannot become rentier property or a speculative asset.

4. Executives and managers of enterprises or government agencies are legally responsible for their acts. If they are convicted of corruption, they can be given the most severe sentences.

5. An oligarchic rentier class, exploiting speculative assets, is not allowed to emerge.

6. The commanding heights of the economy, the natural resources and the major industrial producers, are publicly owned or publicly controlled.

7. The government controls those who become wealthy; the wealthy don’t control the government.

8. Crises of unsustainable odious private and public debt are resolved with a systemic solution—creditors have to pay the cost of irresponsible lending in order to avoid the widespread negative effects of waiting for debtors to pay unrepayable debts.

9. Competition from bourgeois political parties (pluralism) is forbidden. Not all, but most competing parties would end up being backed by foreign NGOs and governments. Democratic socialism is exercised through education, media platforms, petitions, citizens voting for delegates in the ruling congress, and through participation in various citizens’ committees and local bodies.

10. Patronage, corporate sponsorship and popularity are not factors in selecting people to fill positions in high office. Candidates for these positions are selected based on their qualifications and experience.

11. No election cycle, no cycle of destroying what predecessors started. No demagogues. The main themes of foreign and domestic policy are consistent over decades. There are no new parties and leaders who come in to tear up treaties and destroy that which was yet to bear fruit.

Notes

[1] Nguyen Huy Thiep, The General Retires and Other Stories (1987, English edition by Oxford University Press, 1993).

[2] Richard Harvey Brown, Society as Text: Essays on Rhetoric, Reason and Reality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).