Friday, August 14, 2020

Evyn Lê Espiritu: “Who was Colonel Hồ Ngọc Cẩn?”: Theorizing the Relationship between History and Cultural Memory


Pomona College
2013

Who was Colonel Hồ Ngọc Cẩn?



"Who was Colonel Hồ Ngọc Cẩn?" To the current Communist government of Vietnam, whose historical narrative of national unity against foreign invasion denies the legitimacy of South Vietnam, he is a political traitor. To the American state, who conceptualizes the Vietnam War as a struggle between the U.S. and the Communists, he is a forgotten subject. To patriotic South Vietnamese veterans in the diaspora, who push back against these state imposed narratives of “organized forgetting,” he is hero. To Colonel Hồ Ngọc Cẩn’s family members, most of whom live in Vietnam, he is a loved a one they cannot mourn because of state suppression. To me, he is a grand-uncle, though I did not know of his fame—of his story—until I was twenty-one.

This film embodies rather than effaces the tensions of these conflicting narratives, reproducing the feelings of simultaneous absence and excess that I felt when I stumbled upon the wealth of on-line information on Colonel Cẩn after twenty-one years of silence. This is not a straight foward biographical documentary, but rather an intertwining of the different histories and memories surrounding Colonel Cẩn. At the center of this story is absence—a ghost. Colonel Cẩn no longer exists, and there is little official written documentation about him. We will never be able to excavate a single “truth.” Rather, we must embrace the multiplicities, acknowledging that the slippages between these conflicting narratives are legitimate, important, and enlightening. From the gaps we may find an answer: "Who was Colonel Hồ Ngọc Cẩn?
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