PLACE AND IDENTITY: REPRESENTATIONS OF NORTH AND SOUTH VIETNAM IN MAI THẢO’S WRITINGS BETWEEN 1954 AND 1975

Abstract

After the Geneva Accords in 1954, nearly one million people left North Vietnam for the South. They are primarily called Bắc di cư. There have been numerous studies on these North Vietnamese refugees, the majority of which are centred around examining them as anti-communists and devout Christians and elucidating the governmental policies and the socio-economic effects related to their southward migration. Nevertheless, limited scholarly attention has been paid to their contested emotional experiences and representations of their homeland in North Vietnam and the place of their arrival in the South. These under-researched aspects possibly denote their complex awareness of themselves while living in the South between 1954 and 1975, if we take into account the theory of the sense of place, which generally stresses the interconnection between place and identity. This article examines how North and South Vietnam are represented by Mai Thảo—a prominent Northern émigré writer in the Republic of Vietnam—in his works published between 1954 and 1975. The aim of this study is to indicate Mai Thảo’s complicated psychological experiences of the place of his origin and the place he took refuge after his migration in 1954 and, more generally, his consciousness and representation of his identity. I argue that in his works of the late 1950s, North and South Vietnam are mostly represented as politicised places from the vision of a proactively anti-communist Mai Thảo, whilst his depictions of North Vietnam as a lost paradise associated with beautiful recollections and a dystopian South during the 1960s and early 1970s highlight his self-consciousness as a diasporic subject.