IDENTITY
Having started the 20th century as a French colony, the Vietnamese South went through periods of capitalism and communism and was torn apart by a 20 year long war. After a turbulent and traumatic recent history, the country’s modern day capital and its people are evidently in an ongoing search for a stabilised identity. Gillen (2014) talks about ‘spaces of political authenticity that shape the separation between “us” (Vietnam) and “them” (the United States).
Hearing ‘We came here for war, not holiday like you’ and ‘American devils’ highlighted for me the role of violence in the political top-down drawing of boundaries to a collective identity.
On the other hand, A. Tran (2015) uses the everyday psychotherapeutic and self expressive practices as examples of emotion shaping the new Self in today’s Saigon. To me, this was visible through intricate romance of coupling on motorbikes , mass family love expression on the beach or heart-touching hip-hop freestyling in the less tourist-conquered parts of the central streets.
SPEED AND SYMBOL
As with other parts of the developing world, such as Oxford Street, Accra or Lekki Express, Lagos, the urban arteries of HCMC (especially its newly urbanised areas) are becoming undistinguishable behling a thick layer of commercial symbolism.
Street aesthetic of overwhelming signs (some requiring their proper structure) covering buildings and concealing any non-customer-oriented meaning of their architecture. In a similar vane as modern day social media posts, the dominant messages of Saigon’s streets (except for places of major landmarks) are designed for easy public consumption with an intentionally ephemeral and shallow meaning. Las Vegas Strip symbol language, described by R Venturi and D Scott-Brown (1972) is unconsciously appropriated in South Vietnam to cater for the brief attention of reckless moped drivers meandering around cars at high speeds.
CONTRASTS
Words and images of against scenes of everyday love and care; red-and-yellow communist banners against shiny new office towers; deafening bars with sweaty European Backpackers, hallucinating on balloon laughing gas, against peaceful Local eateries with wrinkled workers on low plastic chairs; 3-metre-tall glittering advertisements against century-old colonial facade carvings: Saigon/HCMC is a self redefining place of many contrasts – a message I took away from a very superficial two-day observation.
Refeeences:
Gillen, J., (2014) Tourism and Nation Building at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 104:6, 1307-1321
Venturi, R, Scott Brown, D, Learning from Las Vegas, MIT Press, Cambridge MA 1972
Tran, A., Rich Sentiments and the Cultural Politics of Emotion in Postreform Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 117, No. 3, pp. 480–492, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. ⃝C 2015
no.balsa 