The old general officially died in his hundred-and-second year, on Friday 4 October 2013, at the Central Military Hospital 108 in Hà Nội. Officially, because it was rumoured that Võ Nguyên Giáp had already passed away on the preceding Monday but that the Communist Party had delayed the announcement in order to not detract from the opening of the Eighth Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee on that day. Now that resolutions had been passed, personnel questions settled and communiqués issued, the state could turn its attention towards funeral arrangements for its former hero and last living link with the canonised father of the nation, Hồ Chí Minh. This, however, would also be a delicate matter.
At the time of his passing, Giáp had become a thorn in the government’s side. He had lost his post as Minister for Defence and his membership of the all-powerful Politburo in 1981, and saw out the decade as Deputy Prime Minister in charge of Technology and Science and, improbably, as the head of the national birth control campaign before officially retiring in 1991. Not content with simply burnishing his image as a military strategist who had defeated the French, the Americans, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge and lastly the Chinese in the brief 1979 Sino-Vietnamese border war, he had made a political comeback of sorts during his long retirement, intervening in the politics of the day. As late as 2009 he had issued statements from his villa near Hồ Chí Minh’s mausoleum denouncing the government for allowing Chinese companies to mine bauxite in the Central Highlands.
The news of Giáp’s passing rapidly spread on social media. The magnitude of the event became clear to me the morning after the announcement, while I was having a coffee at Ca Phe Cong on Điện Biên Phủ Boulevard—a street named after his iconic victory against the French, which effectively ended a hundred years of colonial rule. On the footpath outside, thousands of ordinary citizens were gathering, lining up to bid the general a final farewell. It was an extraordinarily large gathering with the queue snaking down the boulevard and around the next corner to Giáp’s villa about a kilometre away. The mood was subdued—solemn, even—and the security forces, normally very nervous about public gatherings of any kind or size, kept a low profile. This public display continued for days.
The crowd was mixed, among it many young people: schoolchildren in their Young Pioneer outfits of white shirts and red scarves; members of the Communist Youth Union wearing blue shirts and olive-green bucket hats. There were office workers and shopkeepers, and many old people, most likely veterans of one or more of the four wars the general had fought. One of them stood directly in my line of vision outside the café window, his looks reminiscent of the father of independent Việt Nam, Hồ Chí Minh himself. Sporting the same wispy beard, a khaki tropical jacket hanging off his slight, stooped frame, he was clutching a small bouquet of yellow dahlias and patiently waiting to pay his respects. He was not the only one holding yellow flowers; the colour is a symbol of light and hope and as such is customary to wish the deceased well in his transition to the afterlife.
Watching the crowd, the irony of where I sat did not escape me. Ca Phe Cong was designed to trade on the nostalgia for the early days of the communist movement in Việt Nam. Its look was a stylish update of the simple interiors of that earlier time, the walls and wooden shelves decorated with historical photos and artefacts such as the iconic sandals cut from rubber tyres. The café, the brain-child of the niece of a government official, caused quite a stir when it first opened, as many of the older generation considered its look disrespectful to the memory of the generations who fought in the wars of national liberation. However, it proved wildly successful with Vietnamese millennials who had only ever experienced the so-called socialist market economy. For them, the wars Giáp had led were an experience their parents and grandparents rarely talked about.
In his book The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Milan Kundera relates an anecdote about the death of Stalin’s eldest son, Yakov, in a German prisoner-of-war camp. It appears that after a fight with his fellow inmates over the putrid state in which he had left the latrines, Yakov flew into a rage, made a run towards the camp’s fence and was shot by a guard. The mundane background to his death was kept a secret for many years to maintain the myth that the son of the Great Leader had died in a soldierly struggle with Nazism. This, according to Kundera, was a classic case of Kitsch. Kitsch, writes Kundera, ‘excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable to human existence’. It is, in essence, the opposite of shit.
The nostalgic decor of Ca Phe Cong is another example of political Kitsch. Turning history into lifestyle, it reduces and sanitises Việt Nam’s messy and violent wars for independence and socialism into a narrative of a simple, heroic life of hard work and noble struggle for the common good. Yet in many ways its location is fitting, as the historical figure of General Giáp had long been mythologised into the character of a genius military strategist of Napoleonic proportions—a myth the man himself had helped cultivate over the final three decades of his life through numerous interviews and books.
Giáp’s pivotal role in achieving the country’s independence is beyond doubt. In fact, no other military leader has defeated the military machine of the United States before or since. But in a society in which half the population was born after the end of the war in 1975, and one fifth in this century, the extraordinary human cost of that victory is fading into history. By the time of his death the horrors of war, including the cold and calculating way Giáp sacrificed his soldiers for the greater goal, had morphed into a hero’s tale.
I grew up with the American version of that war. As teenagers we flocked to the cinema to watch Coming Home, Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter. Because there were no Vietnamese voices then, Bảo Ninh’s novel The Sorrows of War was a revelation when it was published, shortly after my partner and I returned from our first visit toViệt Nam in 1994. We did not so much read as devour the story of the damaged ex-soldier Kien, tasked with retrieving the remains of the fallen from the former jungle battlefields.
The Sorrows of War has become possibly the most famous novel by a Vietnamese author in the West, and before the advent of e-readers was customarily placed on top of the stacks of photocopied books street vendors used to hawk to tourists. In fact, it is now so famous that it is easy to forget how controversial it was at the time of its publication. Initially it could only be circulated as a mimeographed manuscript, and it was banned in Việt Nam until 2006, although it had already been published in English to great acclaim.
The government rejected what it considered the novel’s excessively negative view of the country’s history, which showed in unflinching detail the psychological toll the war had inflicted on its participants, even on the winning side. In its grim realism, as opposed to the official socialist realism of most other war novels published at the time, Bảo Ninh’s book is the very opposite of Kitsch. Sitting in the Ca Phe Cong café, I remembered this unrelentingly bleak vision of war, and, watching the old veteran patiently waiting in line amidst much younger people, many scrolling on their mobile phones, I wondered what trauma he might carry and whether he felt it had been worth it.
This is not to say that the history of the wars against the French and Americans is being suppressed. Quite the opposite, and necessarily so, as the communist government still derives its legitimacy to a large extent from the Party’s role in these consecutive wars for independence. But that history is carefully curated. The old Soviet joke that the future is certain, but the past is constantly changing also applies to Việt Nam.
The war museum in Hồ Chí Minh City, opened in 1975, is a case in point. I first visited it in 1994, when it was located in the just-refurbished former United States Information Agency building and named ‘Exhibition House for US and Puppet Crimes’. This was an accurate description of what was then an atrocity exhibition of the war crimes perpetrated by US forces and their allies. The exhibits were basic—mainly photographs, surprisingly often culled from US and other Western newspapers—but the relentless accumulation of them packed a raw, emotional punch. We felt nauseated by the suffering inflicted on both Vietnamese civilians and soldiers, and the brutality of the war, which was exactly the purpose of the display.
However, not long after the United States lifted its decades-long economic embargo and re-opened its embassy in Việt Nam, the museum changed its name to the more neutral ‘Exhibition House of War and Aggression’ and removed some of the more incendiary exhibits. As Việt Nam rejoined the international community both economically and politically during the following decade, the building was finally renovated and the museum again renamed, this time as the ‘War Remnants Museum’. The government also expanded its scope to include exhibits from the anti-colonial struggle against the French and the resistance to the Japanese occupation during the Second World War, further historicising the wars of independence.
Back in Hà Nội, while thousands upon thousands were continuing to queue to pay their respects, the preparation for the general’s state funeral—overseen by the General Secretary of the Communist Party and the Deputy Prime Minister, no less—reached fever pitch. The funeral service was scheduled to take place in the morning, after which the casket was to be transferred in a public procession to the airport and flown to Giáp’s home province of Quảng Bình. The general himself had chosen his burial site, on a remote hill which required the hasty construction of an access road. The site overlooked the mountainous highlands in the west and the South China Sea in the east, called East Sea (Biển Đôn) in Việt Nam in a not-too-subtle dig at China’s claims of sovereignty over this body of water.
Yet not all veterans joined the rituals of public mourning. There were rumours about the privileges Giáp had been able to obtain: his stately government villa; the advantages members of his family enjoyed; and, indeed, the construction of his extravagant tomb. For some, the general had committed too many transgressions.
It had been an open secret for a long time that when Giáp’s daughter was married to then-budding tech entrepreneur Trương Gia Bình, his new son-in-law got the contract to provide IT services to the Vietnamese military. This was the first significant step towards turning his company into the multinational conglomerate it is today. Even Wikipedia coyly states that ‘being the deputy prime minister in charge of science and technology from 1982 to 1991, Giáp lent a lot of help to Bình in founding of FPT’.
Giáp was different things to different people: a fiery nationalist; a brilliant military strategist; an environmental activist; maybe also a person too fond of the good life. But there was no underestimating the outpouring of public grief. Yet was it grief for the man, or for the Kitsch of an idealised past of seemingly untainted noble political goals? For the theatre of a state funeral has always been a pinnacle of political Kitsch, its purpose to reinforce a cleansed version of history through absences—the absence of messiness, disorder and the morally dubious. In short, the absence of shit.
Comments
Andreas, yours is a fine contribution. Reflective, rich in sharp detail and composed. I followed your account with appreciation.
Acknowledging your point that kitsch political funerals sluice-off the messy detail that might pervert the officially desired account, I still admit to being a sucker for, and at times actually peddling, the sentiment that such events are designed to evoke. It’s a slippery topic. On the one hand, there is good reason to honour individuals and, more importantly, the worthy causes with which they have been identified, and, on the other, it is necessary to recognize how such events can be exploited.
As an boomer, the ‘American War’ and the insuperable actions of the Vietnamese in defeating their materially more powerful opponent, remain resonant. Far more important that this meaning is for me is that many, but certainly not all, Vietnamese people remain deeply connected to this history. Visiting the minimal, definitely non-touristy museum in Dien Bien Phu brings this home powerfully: the quiet devotion evident in those who observe the modest exhibits speaks of a pride that is as righteous as it is quietly worn. Good on you I say. There is energy and honour in acknowledging deeds of thoughtful and steadfast defiance.