Performing Remembering by Rivka Syd Eisner

Author:Rivka Syd Eisner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319736150
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Looking Luxurious and Overturning Affluence

As cô Kim Dung tells her story, she describes wanting to look the part through performing, but this is messy territory so she stresses a distinction between practicing indulgence and being indulgent. “You are expected to look like a queen.” The stress on expected marks her masquerade as a duty, a performance command that she must follow. “She did dress up, make-up” in order to “look luxurious.” Hương’s careful, repetitive wording makes clear this is a critical masquerade, but cô Kim Dung’s affective remembering blurs the boundaries and distinctions between appearing, feeling, and being. This point is further complicated by cô Kim Dung’s affluent history. At the theater, cô Kim Dung masks her wealth by playing it; through masquerade’s delightful “deliberate” “overstat[ing],” she keeps a delicious double-secret of the present charade and a not-so-distant memory of taboo privilege (Tseëlon 2001, 2). As Della Pollock states, a “secret is itself two-faced”; it exists “[a]s a secret, embedded in secrecy, it double talks, permeating the delicate membranes that keep inside from out” (1999, 193).

Cô Kim Dung must not confuse the inside with the outside, yet the feeling of enjoying the excesses of indulgence compounded by the pleasures of masquerading a secret, muddies the waters between the euphoria of revolutionary purity and the forbidden attraction of bourgeois frivolity. Cô Kim Dung’s mission is based on and steeped in extravagance: a special meal, sumptuous clothes , the purchase of candies, expensive tickets, jewelry, perfume, and makeup. In contrast, within her guerilla training cô Kim Dung and her comrades perform daily rejection of the elite colonial and colonized lifestyles and ideologies. In this mission, she must participate in the excess she both rejects and enjoys in order to dismantle its oppressive power.

As she tells it, cô Kim Dung’s family recognized and rejected their privilege. Yet it is clear cô Kim Dung did know how to practice and perform wealth from having lived within its folds. As a young girl, cô Kim Dung knew how to operate the technologies and bodily practices of privilege. It is this knowledge, coupled with her enthusiasm, which caused her to be chosen for the Majestic Theater mission. The mission became an opportunity for cô Kim Dung to use her expertise and simultaneously reject it by skillfully performing its subversion. In her retelling, cô Kim Dung does not hide her affluent background but she does frame the lifestyle of the theatergoing Saigon elite, the “employees of the French,” as decadent while emphasizing her family’s sacrifices, support, and commitment to the Communist movement. After telling me about her family’s jewelry business, and how they supported anti-colonial, revolutionary efforts, cô Kim Dung is quick to add that in the aftermath of the French defeat in 1954, her family switched to owning a rice-processing factory in order to better “help the Communists.”

That cô Kim Dung and others in the performance group came from upper- and middle-class families is not uncommon. Noticing the prevalence of upper- and middle-class backgrounds amongst founding

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