Diasporic Returns and the Making of Vietnamese American Ghost Films in Vietnam

This article tracks the ways in which Vietnamese diasporic narratives of return are shadowed by history and capital and how the figure of the Vietnamese refugee is critical to the reimagining of Vietnam in terms of culture. In particular, it focuses on Vietnamese American ghost films made in Vietnam. Often produced collaboratively and transnationally, these films are framed by a haunting of history because they incorporate the work and finances of those who were cast outside the national family after the war ended in 1975. While Vietnamese refugees were denounced as traitors to the national family–and thus viewed as symbolically dead by the state–the diaspora are revenants of an interesting and important kind; they return as investors, tourists, artists, and filmmakers. Looking at the making of Vietnamese American ghost narratives, my work traces the ligaments between the national to the transnational, more specifically between southern Việt Nam and southern California, in the making of Vietnamese films today. I use Lê Văn Kiệt’s House in the Alley (2012) as a case example to illustrate how this genre is both commercially viable and politically resonant for Vietnamese American directors who must work under the auspices of the state. The article concludes with the importance of studying what remains repressed in the articulations of a globalized Vietnamese nationhood, that is, diasporic histories.