PROSTITUTION IN A LIBERALIZING VIETNAM: THE ECONOMY, HIERARCHY AND GEOGRAPHY OF PLEASURE
Thu-Hương Nguyễn-Võ
Dept. of Politics and Society
University of California, Irvine
email: [email protected]
(From work in progress, comments welcome)
My paper explores the forms of the consumption of sexual pleasure and its commodification in Vietnam during economic liberalization. There are already excellent studies on the world economy and tourism in connection with prostitution in Asia (Thanh Dam Truong, 1990; Pasuk Phongpaichit, 1982; Suwanna Satha-Anand, 1996). Acknowledging the tourist connection, I nevertheless argue that there is a process of the commodification of sexual pleasure for domestic consumption, integral to liberalizing economic practices. In a market which does not conform to neo-classical assumptions of unimpeded private ownership of the means of production, and free flows in the factors of production (land, labor, and capital), state and private entrepreneurs must establish connections to gain access to information, capital, contracts, and materials. A logic of economic liberalizing has emerged with clientelist features among state and private entrepreneurs in the market place. The buying of sexual pleasure for each other has become an important means of facilitating these clientelist connections as access to the means of production and exchange. Places of pleasure become sites where business is conducted (contracts signed, connections made), and the activity of consuming pleasure becomes the mark of this entrepreneurial class. Building on Judith Butler's notion of performative gender (1990), I argue that the forms of consumption and commodification of pleasure constitute performances of class and nation, predicated on a gender difference. Consuming women and their bodies allows men to not just construct themselves as men, but Vietnamese men of a certain class.
THE "HOOKING ECONOMY" AND THE PLACE OF PLEASURE
Background
The economic model that was implemented in the North (the Democratic Republic of Vietnam) from the mid 1950s and nation-wide for a decade after the end of the war in 1975 sought to "construct socialism." This meant replacing private property with public ownership of the means of production in Soviet-style central planning of industrialization, controlling "prices, money, interest and exchange rates" detaching the "domestic market from the world market." (Le Duc Thuy, 1989:98). The state determined quantities, prices, purchasing and marketing. It supplied funds to the state enterprises, collected profits and absorbed losses. There emerged a two-tier price system as the state fixed prices and rationed goods for state wage-earners in what was called the "coupon regime" (che do tem phieu).
The years preceding reforms in Vietnam saw factories running at half their capacity, and persistent food shortages (Asia Yearbook 1987). Inflation was soaring at 774.7 percent in 1986.1 After the disastrous attempt at preserving command economics with the currency conversion of 1985, and encouraged by successes with the system of contracting out land use to farming families since the early 1980s (khoan), the party decided to embrace comprehensive reforms. The slogan of "Reform or Die" at the Sixth Party Congress in December 1986 heralded the beginning of a new era marked by Tu Duy Moi (new thinking), and Doi Moi co che Quan Ly Kinh Te (reforms in economic management).
Reforms in economic management was the codeword for the recognition of market mechanisms in the economy. It meant first and foremost incentives to improve performance and productivity tied to the decentralization of economic decision-making. Next, it meant the diversification of forms of ownership, giving rise to an officially recognized private sector. This move had the effect of a double opening. Not only did Vietnam open up to the capitalist world economy through foreign direct investment (FDI) and foreign trade, it also opened up its state-owned enterprises to competition in the market which now included private companies.
Most analysts agree that by 1989, Vietnam had some sort of a market economy, although they disagree on the exact nature of this market and its future direction. Fforde and Vylder note that the two-tier price system had been dismantled; as was the "system of central planning based on state allocations of inputs and obligatory production targets for the individual enterprises" (1995:243).
Vietnam's Liberalizing Economy
The literature on Vietnam's "economic transition" offers two basic diagnoses, both based on liberalist premises. The first is an economistic approach which generally views the Vietnamese liberalizing economic experience as a success. It attributes this success to the fact that Vietnam had made a break with the "highly bureaucratized and centralized Soviet system" of the past (Van Arkadie, 1993:437). Along this line is the assessment that Vietnam "raised its growth rate by 4 percentage points in 1989 when it instituted big-bang style of microeconomic liberalization and macroeconomic stabilization" (Sachs and Woo, 1994:274). The second line of diagnosis starts from analyses of the Vietnamese political structure and arrives at a more pessimistic conclusion of inertia due to "bureaucratic centralism," which allowed economic liberalization to take place only with the generational transfer of power in the mid 1980s (Porter, 1993).
Both lines of argument are based on the assumption that the Vietnamese political organization is incompatible with a market economy. This kind of assumption is liberalist or neo-classical. It insists that a real market must have an accompanying political organization which safeguards private ownership of the means of production (necessary for a free market in the factors of production--land, labor, and capital), and free competition (which requires transparency, good information flows, etc.). Since the Vietnamese socialist system seems incapable of providing any of these conditions at the beginning of liberalization, a momentous break in policy, either of a big-bang nature or a generational transfer of power, must be posited. Although there were political pronouncements opening the way for policy changes to accommodate liberalization, the features of the Vietnamese liberalizing economy do not correspond to assumptions of success based on neo-classical compatibility between economic requirements and political safeguards. Among the Vietnamese "aberrations" from the neo-classical model: land is still held by the state (although there is privately held "land use rights," this complicates and impedes a free land market); there are major constraints in the labor and capital markets; there are state enterprise monopolies geographically and commodity-wise; information about the market as well as about selective bureaucratic intervention is not readily available without good connections. In short, there was no big-bang in policies creating market conditions.
In my analysis, I rely on approaches based on observation of actual economic practices, especially at the firm level. Fforde and Vylder (1995) offer a revealing analysis of "micro-adaptation" at the firm level prior to official liberalization in the form of "breaking the fence" (pha rao) or creative procurement and marketing by individual firms, and which became the basis of firm behavior as state enterprises became "commercialized." This micro-adaptation at the enterprise level exhibits clientelist features as observed by Wank in the Chinese liberalizing economy, not as a vestige of a centralized communist system, but as the "institutional process of marketization" itself (1996:838). It is a market just as dynamic as any ideal neo-classical market, evident in the phenomenal growth rates boasted by Vietnam and China in the past decade. However, this is a market in which the flow of materials, capital, and information about the market must be actively accessed through more personal channels, the personal "hooking up" (moc noi) of economic operators. Vietnam's is a "hooking economy." These personal connections provide access links among state and private entrepreneurs (foreign and domestic) with the state sector in the pivotal position. It is all about access to the procurement of information, capital, contracts, and materials.
As a result of the combination of "breaking the fence" behavior and official policy recognizing the need for decision-making at the enterprise level in the burgeoning market, there was a commercialization of not just state-owned production enterprises, but also most governmental units as these get into the game of profit-chasing in the market place. The expression is "to break out and do some business" (bung ra lam an).
Commercialized, the state-owned work units (co quan) could make decisions on their own and diversify their income sources. Profit became the real bottom line. The production enterprises could now make decisions regarding procurement and marketing of their products. Most work units found themselves free to convert inert assets into profitable ventures, regardless whether they were production units. For instance, villas and buildings long allocated to the ministries and their local bureaus were turned into profit-making hotels. The General Office of Energy formerly belonging to the Ministry of Heavy Industry, and Public Security, belonging to the Interior Ministry are known to offer good guest houses and hotels due to their choice real estate assets throughout the country. Work units also set up (state-owned) companies in pursuit of profit using their expertise and their government/party connections, in addition to their tangible assets allocated to them as a government or party organ. for instance, the Ministry of Light Industry would be in a good position to set up a Phu Lam Shoes Import and Export Company or a Tan Tien Plastic Packaging Company. The Ministry of Construction would be in a good position to set up the Alliance of Construction Material companies, to which a Hochiminh City Construction Company would belong. The results include: (1) de facto monopolies locally and even in sectors not officially protected as state domains (like mining, communications and banking); and (2) a blurring of distinction between state entrepreneurs and state bureaucrats. The commercialization of state units has in effect turned most bureaucrats into state entrepreneurs profiting from business ventures. Micro-adaptation based on the profit incentive also goes to benefit those in the work unit (co quan) involved. Profit is used to enhance the quality of life for members of the work unit (cai thien doi song). Thus, this creative micro-adaptation has become the driving force with few questions asked. Everyone stands to gain, nullifying the inertia hypothesis regarding "bureaucratic centralism."
The pivotal position of the state sector includes access to the state-held means of production (land, factories), and bureaucratic advantages, navigating the selective bureaucratic intervention of a state groping to devise control mechanisms in the uncharted territory of a market economy. Foreign investment usually takes the form of joint-ventures or contracts with a state-owned company. Bureaucratic regulations such as "delegated importation and exportation" (xuat nhap y thac) requires the private enterprises to import materials and export products through a state-owned company for clearance through the various ministerial controls. Thus, while the state-owned enterprise may need the operating cash from private sub-contractors,2 it acts as a middleman through which the private entrepreneurs gain access to foreign contracts, materials, distribution, information, and passage through bureaucratic controls.3
This practice of micro-adaptation, utilizing the bureaucratic assets to make a profit, blurs the line between legal and illegal undertakings (as it had in the past in the form of an under-the-table economy). Delegated importation and exportation could be utilized as a front for the evasion of taxes, the sum of which would be divided among the private entrepreneur and the state company involved. This phenomenon of "negative activities" include the creation of state-owned general corporations to act merely as "middlemen or clearing houses for products and services," "importing machineries for production under regulations allowing for `contribution to production capital' to evade taxation while reselling them domestically," "exploiting loop-holes in state regulations for illegal activities through the so-called economic contracts" (Tran Ngoc Dinh, 1992: 31-39).
Legally or illegally, business transactions among state and private enterprises take place via personal channels. This is especially true for illegal transactions because of the high requirement of trust involved. Freer to make decisions, and endowed with tangible assets (real estate, sites, buildings, factories), as well as intangible assets (connections to bureaucrats in the government regulatory agencies as well as managers in other state enterprises), the managers and employees of the state-owned enterprises find themselves in a position to grant subcontracts, coordinate procurement of production materials, and ease bureaucratic regulations for the emerging private entrepreneurs. Although personal connections are generally necessary in the integration of the state and private sectors in this economy, these connections focus on state entrepreneurs since the state sector occupies the pivotal position, not least in linking foreign investment to domestic private entrepreneurs. The latter find themselves in a position of asking for these favors at a price. The pattern of interaction that has emerged between state managers and the private entrepreneurs involves inside hooking as a pre-requisite of business deals. These personal connections, or "hooking up," primarily takes the form of the offer and acceptance of the consumption of sexual pleasure. This activity has become one of the most importance means to facilitate business.
The favor grantees would take the favor grantors out to bia om, literally "hug beer," a catch-all phrase for places that serve various foods, alcoholic drinks, and invariably pleasure through access to women's bodies in a range of semi-sexual to sexual services. The women serve the men by pouring the latter's drinks, preparing their food, wiping their faces. These are to be followed by the hostesses hugging, kissing and touching the men. They may be asked to take off their clothes as part of their entertainment service. Should a male customer become dissatisfied with a hostess, she would be replaced by another hostess at the customer's request. Sexual intercourse could take place at these establishments if there are rooms such as at restaurants/hotels/massage parlors, or partitioned rooms such as karaoke restaurants. Or it could take place at rendez-vous places agreed upon by the parties involved.
As this pleasure industry grows in ingenuity both to keep offering ever more exotic fares to the guests and to elude crack-downs unleashed by anti-social ill campaigns most intense in the city, pleasure places flourish in the suburbs, and near-by resort towns, and along the highways connecting cities to rural provinces. There have now appeared "hammock cafes," "thatched-hut cafes," "hugging lounge chairs on the beach," "thousand-star hotels" (seaside, lakeside, riverbank outdoor places that are not registered restaurants), "hugging sea-bathing," etc., all of which serve primarily as venues for prostitution.4
The practice of taking each other out to have a pleasurable time in the manners described has become a currency which, according to those involved, affords deniability, secures contacts in sensitive situations, and serves as an expression of gratitude. A private entrepreneur recalled one go-between who denied responsibility for a deal-gone-wrong by saying: "`I didn't take one dong from you.' And what can you say in response? You can't say to him, `but you ate, drank, and played'" (Hieu, interview, 2 August 1996). Outright illegal activities (or more generally "dodging" - lach) require discretion. Thus, more are drawn into this economic game playing go-betweens, as potential partners need to get acquainted and familiarized. Familiarity is an order of business in all sensitive situations which often blur the line between bending the rules and breaking the laws. Hieu explained, "It's not like five private companies put in five sealed bids [for sub-contracts from a state-owned company]. No, it's all inside hooking. Me too. I have to cultivate my contact and take him aside and ask him: `how much is that other company's bid, tell me and I'll give you a lower quote'" (interview, 2 August 1996). There are some sub-contracts that Hieu won through "almost twenty times of taking different people out to bia om, each time costing me from two to three million dong for a contract worth a few million dong"5 (interview, 4 June 1996).
If the consumption of sexual pleasure facilitates the personal connections necessary for the functioning of the Vietnamese liberalizing economy, it also serves other purposes for its consumers. These are evident in the forms taken by the commodification of pleasure involving women's bodies. To this we now turn.
THE HIERARCHY AND GEOGRAPHY OF PLEASURE
I build on Judith Butler's notion of performative identity (1990) in my analysis of class and national identity in the consumption of sexual pleasure by Vietnamese men. Butler reads Foucault in Discipline and Punish ([1975] 1995) rewriting Nietzsche internalization model, obliterating the distinction between exteriority and interiority. Identities are not really internalized because the interior is what is repeatedly inscribed on the surface (of the body). Subjectivities or identities including gender, then are not essential or prior to the doing; instead, they are performed, thereby constituted in repetitive performances (Butler, 1990: 24-25, 134-141).
Hierarchy: Marking Class
The sale and consumption of women's sexual services are used as a tool of class advancement by both the men who are consumers and the women who are providers in a society undergoing a rapid process of socio-economic stratification. In the murky beginnings of the formation of classes brought on by economic liberalization, men and women incessantly mark their class with the signs of spending power in order to assert the presence of these nascent classes, as these have yet to acquire a clearly defined and enduring position in the mode and relations of production and exchange. But whether this pleasure trade evenly distributes the signs of class and status among the consumers and the providers is a matter we must explore. I argue that one class in particular stands to benefit the most in this process of class differentiation: men who are state and private entrepreneurs, joined as a class in their direct and indirect access to the means of production and exchange.
Most women in the pleasure trade see their work as a way to make a living and move up in the world. Hang, a bia om worker summarized her motive thus:
With bia om, you can work even if you're illiterate. All you need is to look a bit pretty. [...]. You take the money, solve your impoverished parents' problems, fix their place up a bit, help your brothers and sisters with some money to start up something so they could make a living. What's more, afterwards there's even a bit of security for yourself. You move up in the world (interview, 19 May 1996).
The money made with bia om would put these women in the rich category of Vietnamese with an average monthly income ten times the salary of an industrial worker. According to Minh, another bia om worker, money does bestow a certain status on the women as they can afford the jewelry and new products available on the market:
While you work, you have motorcycles and clothes. When you go down the street, you see these beautiful girls who ride Dreams and Cubs [the best makes of motorcycles, a sign of money], with gold bangles on their wrists. Their faces look like nice girls as though they are from well-off families. You'd think they are of money. No. They are working girls like me. Taxi dancers. No nice girls. Outside of work, they look nice. Even I mistake them for nice girls. I think sometimes, I dress like this, I ride this kind of motorcycle, who'd know I'm a working girl? (19 May 1996)
But the women's class status as a result of her earned income and her spending power are nullified in a number of ways. One way is the characterization of these women as dishonest, and thus rendering deceptive the signs of status which they had acquired for themselves. As in the above quote, even Minh herself is uneasy with the signs of status in the gold bangles and motorcycles that she had acquired with her money. These women are portrayed as whores out turning their "1001 tricks."6 The women's clientele and the types of services they provide do not go a long way in admitting some among them into the a high status category either, partly due to the readily upward and downward mobility of their trade. Their work is often characterized as non-work, as turning tricks, which excludes them from being classified as part of the honest working class. The result is the women experience a sort of limbo class status, belonging neither to the monied class nor the working class.
To the contrary, the men who partake in the consumption of this pleasure find class differentiation. The bulk of the consumers of pleasure are men who engage in their entrepreneurial activity of business "hooking" in the pleasure places. These state and private entrepreneurs make up a powerful class identifiable in terms of its access to the means of production and exchange. If the concentration of the means of production still legally resides in the hands of the state, state and private entrepreneurs control and direct the production process similar to what Poulantzas envisioned to be the role of the managerial class in the capitalist economy (Poulantzas, 1973). In terms of productive assets, the "disproportionate control of the overall organization of production enables managers/bureaucrats in `really existing socialism' to exploit the labor of others (Wright, 1989). The private entrepreneurs, then, join this class by virtue of their access to the productive assets via their connections to the state entrepreneurs. And as we have seen, these connections are facilitated by the consumption of pleasure. The business-pleasure activity engaged in by the entrepreneurs could then be conveniently used as an enactment of class identity in a rapidly stratifying Vietnam. Before going into the use of this activity to place oneself in this particular class, we will first take a closer look at who comprises this class.
The richest category of households accounts for 10% to 15% of total households, and with an income differential between the richest and poorest of up to 27.03 times (Nguyen, 1994; Bach, 1995). For a very rich family of five, the monthly income is put at roughly 200 US dollars. The spending power of such a monthly income would not fetch a luxurious lifestyle since consumer goods are even more expensive in Vietnam than in the US. Nevertheless, a wealthy class makes its presence felt in the pink marble facades of multi-story houses, in the slick motorcycles and cars, and in the bustling pleasure scene.
According to Bach Hong Viet in an article in the official Communist Review (1995), this category of the "rich" has benefitted from having connections via their members' status as state officials in sectors with foreign contacts.7 They are the private and state entrepreneurs who "manipulate the loopholes in laws and regulations to evade taxes and fees. Here we must mention the large group of state officials, [who with] a simple act of `breaking the wall' in basic construction or a big contract would have sucked from the state 5 to 20 percent of the value of the contract signed," " to the point where their official salary accounts for a minuscule portion of their income" (1995:45). Anti-corruption has become a dangerous weapons wielded by rivals in the governmental and party machineries. As a result, the acquisition of assets could become targets of anti-corruption accounting.
Pleasure consumption, on the other hand affords greater deniability and a convenient way to sort out the status hierarchy among Vietnamese men. Bia om thus has become a performance of class for Vietnamese men. One man's mother urged him to join his friends in these "eat and play" establishments: "if you have money, you have to play. Bia om is a joy, a touch of class for men now-a-day" (Phu Nu, 26 may 1996:6). One respondent in the rich category stated in a CARE study: "Going for girls is a fashionable trend.... It's a rich man's fashion" (Franklin 1994).
The men go to the pleasure places in each other's company to engage in the business deals that mark out their entrepreneurial class. When asked what kind of men frequent their work place, two bia om workers replied:
Hang: It's difficult to tell who they are out there (outside the pleasure places)....
Minh: Most of the classy ones are the big business people. For the sake of business, they have to bring each other in here.
Hang: The person who has to power to sign the contract might want the contract seeker to take him to a specific restaurant, and then say: "I want to sleep with that girl." So the other one would have to get him the girl, and then he'd sign the contract.
Minh: The "big hands" are the ones with money, conducting their business. Next down are those who are after ap phe [usually middlemen getting a commission].
Hang: Contract signers are the "big hands." They are the high-level cadres and officials.
Minh: Further down, there are those with some money who want to have a good time, each pitching in 200,000 dong. For a table of five, that's a million [about 100 US dollars] there. And then there occasionally are the ones without money [the lower-class/working class men] (interview 19 May 1996).
If there's uncertainty about the men's class identity out there in the world, men assert their hierarchy and their class status by the subjection of women to servile services in the pleasure place of bia om. The customers are called "gods" (thuong de). "When a customer asks for two women to serve him at the table, in bed, or on the dance floor, he's playing `king.' Some like it that way. They make so much money they have to find ways to spend it to their hearts' content" (Hang, 24 May 1996). Minh recalled how a man presided over her initiation into this service/servitude:
Minh: I wasn't yet eighteen. Small. Just a kid. I was called to serve this man. He knew it was my first time with a customer. He told me to open his beer bottle. I didn't know how. The beer squirted everywhere. He yelled at me. He knew it was my first time opening a beer bottle, but he still yelled at me. I cried. He told me to set it on the table. Then he yelled, "No, put it under the table." I put it under the table. I didn't know anything, but thought his tip of 6,000 dong was a lot of money. I was so happy to get six thousand.
[. . .]
Hang: Many of these girls know nothing. The sound of the beer can popping startle them the first time. The they paint their nails, put on make-up, hold the cigarette to smoke. Then they're ready to sleep with the customers. If they don't, they just won't be able to cover their expenses (19 May 1996).
This repetitive act of class differentiation for the men is predicated on the differentiation between male customers and the women who serve them. The women's use of the pleasure trade for class advancement fails to bestow on them a clear class identity, be it the monied class or the working class. The distribution of the cultural signs of class thus works differently for the men who buy and the women who sell pleasure. There is an emerging powerful class of Vietnamese, identifiable by their direct and indirect access to the means of production and exchange in a market economy. They are Vietnam's state and private entrepreneurs. Their wealth has come from their position in the state, or connection therewith. A large part of this wealth comes hidden as it is illegally siphoned from the state sector. The murky and precarious possession of their wealth heightens the importance of their wearing the trappings of class. For this class of Vietnamese men, consuming pleasure using women is a convenient way to not only facilitate the generation of their wealth, but also to mark out their class. What is still missing from this formula is a native status that would differentiate Vietnamese entrepreneurs from foreign businessmen who frequent the most expensive pleasure places in Vietnam, a native status that would allow the Vietnamese men to display themselves on a separate class scale. To this we now turn.
Geography: Consuming the Native Land
The glory of past wars against the colonial and foreign capitalist world, the ideological superiority could no longer serve as an adequate Vietnamese identity in the face of a new foreign presence which provides the key to new prosperity. The signs of prosperity are pursued, but with a difference. The consumption of pleasure serves as both the signs of class and differentiation from foreign spending power. As this class of businessmen differentiate themselves from their foreign counterparts, the consumption of sexual pleasure takes on nativist expressions. The Vietnamese-ness commodified for domestic consumption, however, is not the Vietnamese high culture presented to the world. Rather, the folk ways of rurality become commodified in women's bodies for consumption by Vietnamese men.
There are now stretches of "eating and playing" on the highways connecting the cities to the small towns of rural and semi-rural Vietnam. Here, men can sample the local culinary specialties and local girls in ever more exotic forms. According to a Public Security newspaper, one stretch of highway, Song Cau, acquired its reputation
because here there are many specialty dishes (mon an dac san), from the marshes and the sea, that are fresh and delicious. And the red lights come on as night falls. The girls who attract customers to the food are young and agile, with powdered cheeks and colored lips, alluring enough to serve the "gods" as these reach the desired degree of bia om (Cong An Nhan Dan, 13 April 1996).
But why do we find this mixing of "eating" and "playing?" The women who sell pleasure refer to themselves in edible terms, as "a cake" that men who buy can eat as they see fit (Hang 19 May 1996). The men use the "food image" as a justification for "their desire for variety in sexual partners," (CARE AIDS Study, Franklin, 1993) and ever new ways of enjoying pleasure. This search for the exotic, nevertheless, hinges on an indigenous quality rather than calling forth the foreign. One writer, who has made a name for himself in the promotion of nativist knowledge, expounds on the "Vietnamese way" of eating and spending money (Son Nam, 1995). According to this writer, the Vietnamese are willing to pay a lot of money for exotic gustatory fares such as eels, frogs, snakes, various leaves and shoots because they have discovered these native offerings in the course of opening up the land.
Pleasure in women have been commodified precisely as distinctly local offerings to be tasted and appreciated as well. Much of this commodification geared to domestic consumption frames sex in native gustatory desire, as mon dac san, mat me (cool specialty dishes). This mixing of native food and sex bestows an air of rurality which has come to be seized upon as that which defines Vietnamese-ness. Cafes in the outskirts of Saigon promise hammocks, thatched huts, and "rice tantalizing girls of sixteen and seventeen" (Cong An Thanh Pho Ho Chi Minh 24 July 1996). Others in the city promise women for "country-outings" (CATPHCM 29 May 1996). There are plenty of orchard cafes and specialty restaurants that offer "hens with red claws" (prostitutes - seen as rural women with red nails) in the small towns which serve as resorts for the city. In the city itself, authentic rural dishes and simple pleasures in women are to be found deep in small alleys:
Saigonese who are connoisseurs of food and drink like to seek out and enjoy the culinary delights in the small alleys. Famous for the dishes of rice vermicelli and grilled pork, fried rolls is the Casino Alley. Intellectuals, prominent businessmen, and Viet Kieu [overseas Vietnamese] all know the reputation of the Nguyen Hue Alley with Mrs. Ca Doi's shop and her cold meat and pickled cabbage, her country spinach soup, her small pickled melons, her fermented shrimps, all cheap and delightful. If you're nursing some melancholy and want to empty out your sadness, you must stop by the alley of 220 Le Van Vy in District 3, classy and discreet, known for little sisters beautiful as a dream, who would entertain you by the hour just like the call girls (Cong An Nhan Dan 26 May 1996).8
It is a construction of the connoisseur-as-native. A restless search for what is authentically Vietnamese goes on in the inexhaustible depth of an interior inscribed on the surface of the country's geography. A Vietnamese, one is told, can roam the lush countryside and its connecting highways in search of this depth or find it embowelled within the city. All is to be unearthed and sold in the marketplace of pleasure.
The mixing of metaphors, the mingling of food and sex allow the performance of nativism in the act of food ingestion to be duplicated in the act of pleasure consumption using women. The women have come to embody this tie to the land, the consumption of which is an attempt at being native. But although this search for a Vietnamese essence amidst all the profound changes could be rendered comprehensible, the brutality of this act in its transformation of women into ingestible commodities is difficult to be overlooked. As ingestible commodities, many women in this trade feel stripped of a sense of subjectivity. Minh and Hang told me that among themselves, the bia om women would say they agree to serve the men with their "faces," and not with their "viscera": Bang mat chu khong bang long. The differentiation between a surface and an interior gives the women a sense of the possibility of preserving a core being beyond the reach of this objectification.
Anne McClintock has noted that in our times, "women are typically constructed as the symbolic bearers of the nation": "Singapore girl, you're a great way to fly" (1995:354). Similarly, travel publications on Vietnam typically feature the Vietnamese girl in the traditional dress and the long flowing hair, leaning against one dynastic tomb or another of the national landmarks. For the large part of the pleasure market geared to Vietnamese men, however, the women have come to typify the nation by embodying the locally exotic in rurality, inaccessible to foreign men who lack the taste/knowledge to enjoy it. This typification of Vietnamese-ness for Vietnamese, as opposed to the courtly motifs presented to the rest of the world, allows Vietnamese men to perform Vietnamese-ness in two ways. First, it ties them to the land and the history of the people who worked that land via the ingestion of local offerings. Second, it enables these men to assert difference through exclusive knowledge.
CONCLUSION
What I have tried to show is a process of commodifying the exotic for a class of Vietnamese men, integral to current economic practices during liberalization. It is a process predicated on difference: gender, class, nation. If the new rich in Vietnam started out getting their wealth through contacts with the outside world as Bach's study suggests, an emerging class of rich and powerful Vietnamese men has begun to differentiate itself. The Vietnamese men of means must be painfully aware of what Minh said had entered mundane daily exchanges: "Girls of seven and eight. The grown-ups would say, `Oh, she's pretty. Save her and marry her off to a Taiwanese or a Viet Kieu'" (19 May 1996). Phuong, a journalist covering prostitution for a large newspaper said resentfully that when he had to go undercover as a client to get his story at the expensive dance halls, he "would have to flaunt my money for those girls to even come to me, because I am obviously not foreign, and I don't have the looks and style of a Viet Kieu" (3 June 1996). Showing one's spending power at these expensive places is a statement of class parity with foreigners. But consuming the locally exotic beyond the pale of the foreigners separate the natives from outsiders altogether. The former, in their consumption of pleasure mark themselves as lords of their own domain, the essence of which is inaccessible to outsiders on their own. These repetitive acts of class and nation are performed around the gender difference between the women and the men who consume them. Women are in this way excluded from actively utilizing the commodified sexual pleasure in a construction of their national and class identity in a fierce process of social stratification going on in Vietnam.
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Le Duc Thuy. 1993. "Economic Doi Moi in Vietnam: Content, Achievements, and Prospects," in Reinventing Vietnamese Socialism, ed. by W. Turley and M. Selden. Boulder, CO:Westview.
McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York, NY: Routledge.
Nguyen Khac Hien. 1994. "Kinh Te Thi Truong va Cong Bang Xa Hoi," [Market Economy and Social Justice,] in Communist Review, no 2 (1994): 34-38.
Pasuk Phongpaichit. 1982. From Peasant Girls to Bangkok Masseuses. Geneva: International Labor Office.
Porter, Gareth. 1993. Vietnam: The Politics of Bureaucratic Socialism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell.
Poulantzas, N. 1973. Political Power and Social Classes. London, UK: New Left Books.
Sachs, Jefferey and Wing Thye Woo. 1994. "Experiences in the Transition to a Market Economy," Journal of Comparative Economics, no. 18.
Son Nam. 1995. "Mot Khia Canh cua Van Hoa Xai Tien," [An Aspect of the Money-Spending Culture], in An Ninh Kinh Te va Nen Kinh Te Thi Truong Viet Nam, [Economic Security and the Market Economy in Vietnam]. Hochiminh City, VN: The People's Public Security Publishing House.
Suwanna Satha-Anand. 1996. "The Prostitution Question: Contesting Ground for Buddhism and Human Rights in Thailand. Paper prepared for workshop on "New Issues in East Asian Human Rights. Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, Seoul, Korea, 2-5 October 1996.
Tran Ngoc Dinh. 1992. "Thanh Phan Kinh Te Tu Ban Tu Nhan o Thanh Pho Ho Chi Minh" [The Private Economic Sector in Hochiminh City], in Tap Chi Khoa Hoc Xa Hoi, no. 3 (1992):31-39.
Truong, Thanh Dam. 1990. Sex, Money, and Morality: Prostitution and Tourism in Southeast Asia. London, UK: Zed Books.
Van Arkadie, Brian. 1993. "Managing the Renewal Process: The Case of Vietnam." Public Administration and Development, vol. 13, no.4.
Wright, E.O. 1989. "A General Framework for the Analysis of Class Structure," in The Debate on Classes, ed. by E.O. Wright. London, UK: Verso.
Thu-Hương Nguyễn-Võ
Dept. of Politics and Society
University of California, Irvine
email: [email protected]
(From work in progress, comments welcome)
My paper explores the forms of the consumption of sexual pleasure and its commodification in Vietnam during economic liberalization. There are already excellent studies on the world economy and tourism in connection with prostitution in Asia (Thanh Dam Truong, 1990; Pasuk Phongpaichit, 1982; Suwanna Satha-Anand, 1996). Acknowledging the tourist connection, I nevertheless argue that there is a process of the commodification of sexual pleasure for domestic consumption, integral to liberalizing economic practices. In a market which does not conform to neo-classical assumptions of unimpeded private ownership of the means of production, and free flows in the factors of production (land, labor, and capital), state and private entrepreneurs must establish connections to gain access to information, capital, contracts, and materials. A logic of economic liberalizing has emerged with clientelist features among state and private entrepreneurs in the market place. The buying of sexual pleasure for each other has become an important means of facilitating these clientelist connections as access to the means of production and exchange. Places of pleasure become sites where business is conducted (contracts signed, connections made), and the activity of consuming pleasure becomes the mark of this entrepreneurial class. Building on Judith Butler's notion of performative gender (1990), I argue that the forms of consumption and commodification of pleasure constitute performances of class and nation, predicated on a gender difference. Consuming women and their bodies allows men to not just construct themselves as men, but Vietnamese men of a certain class.
THE "HOOKING ECONOMY" AND THE PLACE OF PLEASURE
Background
The economic model that was implemented in the North (the Democratic Republic of Vietnam) from the mid 1950s and nation-wide for a decade after the end of the war in 1975 sought to "construct socialism." This meant replacing private property with public ownership of the means of production in Soviet-style central planning of industrialization, controlling "prices, money, interest and exchange rates" detaching the "domestic market from the world market." (Le Duc Thuy, 1989:98). The state determined quantities, prices, purchasing and marketing. It supplied funds to the state enterprises, collected profits and absorbed losses. There emerged a two-tier price system as the state fixed prices and rationed goods for state wage-earners in what was called the "coupon regime" (che do tem phieu).
The years preceding reforms in Vietnam saw factories running at half their capacity, and persistent food shortages (Asia Yearbook 1987). Inflation was soaring at 774.7 percent in 1986.1 After the disastrous attempt at preserving command economics with the currency conversion of 1985, and encouraged by successes with the system of contracting out land use to farming families since the early 1980s (khoan), the party decided to embrace comprehensive reforms. The slogan of "Reform or Die" at the Sixth Party Congress in December 1986 heralded the beginning of a new era marked by Tu Duy Moi (new thinking), and Doi Moi co che Quan Ly Kinh Te (reforms in economic management).
Reforms in economic management was the codeword for the recognition of market mechanisms in the economy. It meant first and foremost incentives to improve performance and productivity tied to the decentralization of economic decision-making. Next, it meant the diversification of forms of ownership, giving rise to an officially recognized private sector. This move had the effect of a double opening. Not only did Vietnam open up to the capitalist world economy through foreign direct investment (FDI) and foreign trade, it also opened up its state-owned enterprises to competition in the market which now included private companies.
Most analysts agree that by 1989, Vietnam had some sort of a market economy, although they disagree on the exact nature of this market and its future direction. Fforde and Vylder note that the two-tier price system had been dismantled; as was the "system of central planning based on state allocations of inputs and obligatory production targets for the individual enterprises" (1995:243).
Vietnam's Liberalizing Economy
The literature on Vietnam's "economic transition" offers two basic diagnoses, both based on liberalist premises. The first is an economistic approach which generally views the Vietnamese liberalizing economic experience as a success. It attributes this success to the fact that Vietnam had made a break with the "highly bureaucratized and centralized Soviet system" of the past (Van Arkadie, 1993:437). Along this line is the assessment that Vietnam "raised its growth rate by 4 percentage points in 1989 when it instituted big-bang style of microeconomic liberalization and macroeconomic stabilization" (Sachs and Woo, 1994:274). The second line of diagnosis starts from analyses of the Vietnamese political structure and arrives at a more pessimistic conclusion of inertia due to "bureaucratic centralism," which allowed economic liberalization to take place only with the generational transfer of power in the mid 1980s (Porter, 1993).
Both lines of argument are based on the assumption that the Vietnamese political organization is incompatible with a market economy. This kind of assumption is liberalist or neo-classical. It insists that a real market must have an accompanying political organization which safeguards private ownership of the means of production (necessary for a free market in the factors of production--land, labor, and capital), and free competition (which requires transparency, good information flows, etc.). Since the Vietnamese socialist system seems incapable of providing any of these conditions at the beginning of liberalization, a momentous break in policy, either of a big-bang nature or a generational transfer of power, must be posited. Although there were political pronouncements opening the way for policy changes to accommodate liberalization, the features of the Vietnamese liberalizing economy do not correspond to assumptions of success based on neo-classical compatibility between economic requirements and political safeguards. Among the Vietnamese "aberrations" from the neo-classical model: land is still held by the state (although there is privately held "land use rights," this complicates and impedes a free land market); there are major constraints in the labor and capital markets; there are state enterprise monopolies geographically and commodity-wise; information about the market as well as about selective bureaucratic intervention is not readily available without good connections. In short, there was no big-bang in policies creating market conditions.
In my analysis, I rely on approaches based on observation of actual economic practices, especially at the firm level. Fforde and Vylder (1995) offer a revealing analysis of "micro-adaptation" at the firm level prior to official liberalization in the form of "breaking the fence" (pha rao) or creative procurement and marketing by individual firms, and which became the basis of firm behavior as state enterprises became "commercialized." This micro-adaptation at the enterprise level exhibits clientelist features as observed by Wank in the Chinese liberalizing economy, not as a vestige of a centralized communist system, but as the "institutional process of marketization" itself (1996:838). It is a market just as dynamic as any ideal neo-classical market, evident in the phenomenal growth rates boasted by Vietnam and China in the past decade. However, this is a market in which the flow of materials, capital, and information about the market must be actively accessed through more personal channels, the personal "hooking up" (moc noi) of economic operators. Vietnam's is a "hooking economy." These personal connections provide access links among state and private entrepreneurs (foreign and domestic) with the state sector in the pivotal position. It is all about access to the procurement of information, capital, contracts, and materials.
As a result of the combination of "breaking the fence" behavior and official policy recognizing the need for decision-making at the enterprise level in the burgeoning market, there was a commercialization of not just state-owned production enterprises, but also most governmental units as these get into the game of profit-chasing in the market place. The expression is "to break out and do some business" (bung ra lam an).
Commercialized, the state-owned work units (co quan) could make decisions on their own and diversify their income sources. Profit became the real bottom line. The production enterprises could now make decisions regarding procurement and marketing of their products. Most work units found themselves free to convert inert assets into profitable ventures, regardless whether they were production units. For instance, villas and buildings long allocated to the ministries and their local bureaus were turned into profit-making hotels. The General Office of Energy formerly belonging to the Ministry of Heavy Industry, and Public Security, belonging to the Interior Ministry are known to offer good guest houses and hotels due to their choice real estate assets throughout the country. Work units also set up (state-owned) companies in pursuit of profit using their expertise and their government/party connections, in addition to their tangible assets allocated to them as a government or party organ. for instance, the Ministry of Light Industry would be in a good position to set up a Phu Lam Shoes Import and Export Company or a Tan Tien Plastic Packaging Company. The Ministry of Construction would be in a good position to set up the Alliance of Construction Material companies, to which a Hochiminh City Construction Company would belong. The results include: (1) de facto monopolies locally and even in sectors not officially protected as state domains (like mining, communications and banking); and (2) a blurring of distinction between state entrepreneurs and state bureaucrats. The commercialization of state units has in effect turned most bureaucrats into state entrepreneurs profiting from business ventures. Micro-adaptation based on the profit incentive also goes to benefit those in the work unit (co quan) involved. Profit is used to enhance the quality of life for members of the work unit (cai thien doi song). Thus, this creative micro-adaptation has become the driving force with few questions asked. Everyone stands to gain, nullifying the inertia hypothesis regarding "bureaucratic centralism."
The pivotal position of the state sector includes access to the state-held means of production (land, factories), and bureaucratic advantages, navigating the selective bureaucratic intervention of a state groping to devise control mechanisms in the uncharted territory of a market economy. Foreign investment usually takes the form of joint-ventures or contracts with a state-owned company. Bureaucratic regulations such as "delegated importation and exportation" (xuat nhap y thac) requires the private enterprises to import materials and export products through a state-owned company for clearance through the various ministerial controls. Thus, while the state-owned enterprise may need the operating cash from private sub-contractors,2 it acts as a middleman through which the private entrepreneurs gain access to foreign contracts, materials, distribution, information, and passage through bureaucratic controls.3
This practice of micro-adaptation, utilizing the bureaucratic assets to make a profit, blurs the line between legal and illegal undertakings (as it had in the past in the form of an under-the-table economy). Delegated importation and exportation could be utilized as a front for the evasion of taxes, the sum of which would be divided among the private entrepreneur and the state company involved. This phenomenon of "negative activities" include the creation of state-owned general corporations to act merely as "middlemen or clearing houses for products and services," "importing machineries for production under regulations allowing for `contribution to production capital' to evade taxation while reselling them domestically," "exploiting loop-holes in state regulations for illegal activities through the so-called economic contracts" (Tran Ngoc Dinh, 1992: 31-39).
Legally or illegally, business transactions among state and private enterprises take place via personal channels. This is especially true for illegal transactions because of the high requirement of trust involved. Freer to make decisions, and endowed with tangible assets (real estate, sites, buildings, factories), as well as intangible assets (connections to bureaucrats in the government regulatory agencies as well as managers in other state enterprises), the managers and employees of the state-owned enterprises find themselves in a position to grant subcontracts, coordinate procurement of production materials, and ease bureaucratic regulations for the emerging private entrepreneurs. Although personal connections are generally necessary in the integration of the state and private sectors in this economy, these connections focus on state entrepreneurs since the state sector occupies the pivotal position, not least in linking foreign investment to domestic private entrepreneurs. The latter find themselves in a position of asking for these favors at a price. The pattern of interaction that has emerged between state managers and the private entrepreneurs involves inside hooking as a pre-requisite of business deals. These personal connections, or "hooking up," primarily takes the form of the offer and acceptance of the consumption of sexual pleasure. This activity has become one of the most importance means to facilitate business.
The favor grantees would take the favor grantors out to bia om, literally "hug beer," a catch-all phrase for places that serve various foods, alcoholic drinks, and invariably pleasure through access to women's bodies in a range of semi-sexual to sexual services. The women serve the men by pouring the latter's drinks, preparing their food, wiping their faces. These are to be followed by the hostesses hugging, kissing and touching the men. They may be asked to take off their clothes as part of their entertainment service. Should a male customer become dissatisfied with a hostess, she would be replaced by another hostess at the customer's request. Sexual intercourse could take place at these establishments if there are rooms such as at restaurants/hotels/massage parlors, or partitioned rooms such as karaoke restaurants. Or it could take place at rendez-vous places agreed upon by the parties involved.
As this pleasure industry grows in ingenuity both to keep offering ever more exotic fares to the guests and to elude crack-downs unleashed by anti-social ill campaigns most intense in the city, pleasure places flourish in the suburbs, and near-by resort towns, and along the highways connecting cities to rural provinces. There have now appeared "hammock cafes," "thatched-hut cafes," "hugging lounge chairs on the beach," "thousand-star hotels" (seaside, lakeside, riverbank outdoor places that are not registered restaurants), "hugging sea-bathing," etc., all of which serve primarily as venues for prostitution.4
The practice of taking each other out to have a pleasurable time in the manners described has become a currency which, according to those involved, affords deniability, secures contacts in sensitive situations, and serves as an expression of gratitude. A private entrepreneur recalled one go-between who denied responsibility for a deal-gone-wrong by saying: "`I didn't take one dong from you.' And what can you say in response? You can't say to him, `but you ate, drank, and played'" (Hieu, interview, 2 August 1996). Outright illegal activities (or more generally "dodging" - lach) require discretion. Thus, more are drawn into this economic game playing go-betweens, as potential partners need to get acquainted and familiarized. Familiarity is an order of business in all sensitive situations which often blur the line between bending the rules and breaking the laws. Hieu explained, "It's not like five private companies put in five sealed bids [for sub-contracts from a state-owned company]. No, it's all inside hooking. Me too. I have to cultivate my contact and take him aside and ask him: `how much is that other company's bid, tell me and I'll give you a lower quote'" (interview, 2 August 1996). There are some sub-contracts that Hieu won through "almost twenty times of taking different people out to bia om, each time costing me from two to three million dong for a contract worth a few million dong"5 (interview, 4 June 1996).
If the consumption of sexual pleasure facilitates the personal connections necessary for the functioning of the Vietnamese liberalizing economy, it also serves other purposes for its consumers. These are evident in the forms taken by the commodification of pleasure involving women's bodies. To this we now turn.
THE HIERARCHY AND GEOGRAPHY OF PLEASURE
I build on Judith Butler's notion of performative identity (1990) in my analysis of class and national identity in the consumption of sexual pleasure by Vietnamese men. Butler reads Foucault in Discipline and Punish ([1975] 1995) rewriting Nietzsche internalization model, obliterating the distinction between exteriority and interiority. Identities are not really internalized because the interior is what is repeatedly inscribed on the surface (of the body). Subjectivities or identities including gender, then are not essential or prior to the doing; instead, they are performed, thereby constituted in repetitive performances (Butler, 1990: 24-25, 134-141).
Hierarchy: Marking Class
The sale and consumption of women's sexual services are used as a tool of class advancement by both the men who are consumers and the women who are providers in a society undergoing a rapid process of socio-economic stratification. In the murky beginnings of the formation of classes brought on by economic liberalization, men and women incessantly mark their class with the signs of spending power in order to assert the presence of these nascent classes, as these have yet to acquire a clearly defined and enduring position in the mode and relations of production and exchange. But whether this pleasure trade evenly distributes the signs of class and status among the consumers and the providers is a matter we must explore. I argue that one class in particular stands to benefit the most in this process of class differentiation: men who are state and private entrepreneurs, joined as a class in their direct and indirect access to the means of production and exchange.
Most women in the pleasure trade see their work as a way to make a living and move up in the world. Hang, a bia om worker summarized her motive thus:
With bia om, you can work even if you're illiterate. All you need is to look a bit pretty. [...]. You take the money, solve your impoverished parents' problems, fix their place up a bit, help your brothers and sisters with some money to start up something so they could make a living. What's more, afterwards there's even a bit of security for yourself. You move up in the world (interview, 19 May 1996).
The money made with bia om would put these women in the rich category of Vietnamese with an average monthly income ten times the salary of an industrial worker. According to Minh, another bia om worker, money does bestow a certain status on the women as they can afford the jewelry and new products available on the market:
While you work, you have motorcycles and clothes. When you go down the street, you see these beautiful girls who ride Dreams and Cubs [the best makes of motorcycles, a sign of money], with gold bangles on their wrists. Their faces look like nice girls as though they are from well-off families. You'd think they are of money. No. They are working girls like me. Taxi dancers. No nice girls. Outside of work, they look nice. Even I mistake them for nice girls. I think sometimes, I dress like this, I ride this kind of motorcycle, who'd know I'm a working girl? (19 May 1996)
But the women's class status as a result of her earned income and her spending power are nullified in a number of ways. One way is the characterization of these women as dishonest, and thus rendering deceptive the signs of status which they had acquired for themselves. As in the above quote, even Minh herself is uneasy with the signs of status in the gold bangles and motorcycles that she had acquired with her money. These women are portrayed as whores out turning their "1001 tricks."6 The women's clientele and the types of services they provide do not go a long way in admitting some among them into the a high status category either, partly due to the readily upward and downward mobility of their trade. Their work is often characterized as non-work, as turning tricks, which excludes them from being classified as part of the honest working class. The result is the women experience a sort of limbo class status, belonging neither to the monied class nor the working class.
To the contrary, the men who partake in the consumption of this pleasure find class differentiation. The bulk of the consumers of pleasure are men who engage in their entrepreneurial activity of business "hooking" in the pleasure places. These state and private entrepreneurs make up a powerful class identifiable in terms of its access to the means of production and exchange. If the concentration of the means of production still legally resides in the hands of the state, state and private entrepreneurs control and direct the production process similar to what Poulantzas envisioned to be the role of the managerial class in the capitalist economy (Poulantzas, 1973). In terms of productive assets, the "disproportionate control of the overall organization of production enables managers/bureaucrats in `really existing socialism' to exploit the labor of others (Wright, 1989). The private entrepreneurs, then, join this class by virtue of their access to the productive assets via their connections to the state entrepreneurs. And as we have seen, these connections are facilitated by the consumption of pleasure. The business-pleasure activity engaged in by the entrepreneurs could then be conveniently used as an enactment of class identity in a rapidly stratifying Vietnam. Before going into the use of this activity to place oneself in this particular class, we will first take a closer look at who comprises this class.
The richest category of households accounts for 10% to 15% of total households, and with an income differential between the richest and poorest of up to 27.03 times (Nguyen, 1994; Bach, 1995). For a very rich family of five, the monthly income is put at roughly 200 US dollars. The spending power of such a monthly income would not fetch a luxurious lifestyle since consumer goods are even more expensive in Vietnam than in the US. Nevertheless, a wealthy class makes its presence felt in the pink marble facades of multi-story houses, in the slick motorcycles and cars, and in the bustling pleasure scene.
According to Bach Hong Viet in an article in the official Communist Review (1995), this category of the "rich" has benefitted from having connections via their members' status as state officials in sectors with foreign contacts.7 They are the private and state entrepreneurs who "manipulate the loopholes in laws and regulations to evade taxes and fees. Here we must mention the large group of state officials, [who with] a simple act of `breaking the wall' in basic construction or a big contract would have sucked from the state 5 to 20 percent of the value of the contract signed," " to the point where their official salary accounts for a minuscule portion of their income" (1995:45). Anti-corruption has become a dangerous weapons wielded by rivals in the governmental and party machineries. As a result, the acquisition of assets could become targets of anti-corruption accounting.
Pleasure consumption, on the other hand affords greater deniability and a convenient way to sort out the status hierarchy among Vietnamese men. Bia om thus has become a performance of class for Vietnamese men. One man's mother urged him to join his friends in these "eat and play" establishments: "if you have money, you have to play. Bia om is a joy, a touch of class for men now-a-day" (Phu Nu, 26 may 1996:6). One respondent in the rich category stated in a CARE study: "Going for girls is a fashionable trend.... It's a rich man's fashion" (Franklin 1994).
The men go to the pleasure places in each other's company to engage in the business deals that mark out their entrepreneurial class. When asked what kind of men frequent their work place, two bia om workers replied:
Hang: It's difficult to tell who they are out there (outside the pleasure places)....
Minh: Most of the classy ones are the big business people. For the sake of business, they have to bring each other in here.
Hang: The person who has to power to sign the contract might want the contract seeker to take him to a specific restaurant, and then say: "I want to sleep with that girl." So the other one would have to get him the girl, and then he'd sign the contract.
Minh: The "big hands" are the ones with money, conducting their business. Next down are those who are after ap phe [usually middlemen getting a commission].
Hang: Contract signers are the "big hands." They are the high-level cadres and officials.
Minh: Further down, there are those with some money who want to have a good time, each pitching in 200,000 dong. For a table of five, that's a million [about 100 US dollars] there. And then there occasionally are the ones without money [the lower-class/working class men] (interview 19 May 1996).
If there's uncertainty about the men's class identity out there in the world, men assert their hierarchy and their class status by the subjection of women to servile services in the pleasure place of bia om. The customers are called "gods" (thuong de). "When a customer asks for two women to serve him at the table, in bed, or on the dance floor, he's playing `king.' Some like it that way. They make so much money they have to find ways to spend it to their hearts' content" (Hang, 24 May 1996). Minh recalled how a man presided over her initiation into this service/servitude:
Minh: I wasn't yet eighteen. Small. Just a kid. I was called to serve this man. He knew it was my first time with a customer. He told me to open his beer bottle. I didn't know how. The beer squirted everywhere. He yelled at me. He knew it was my first time opening a beer bottle, but he still yelled at me. I cried. He told me to set it on the table. Then he yelled, "No, put it under the table." I put it under the table. I didn't know anything, but thought his tip of 6,000 dong was a lot of money. I was so happy to get six thousand.
[. . .]
Hang: Many of these girls know nothing. The sound of the beer can popping startle them the first time. The they paint their nails, put on make-up, hold the cigarette to smoke. Then they're ready to sleep with the customers. If they don't, they just won't be able to cover their expenses (19 May 1996).
This repetitive act of class differentiation for the men is predicated on the differentiation between male customers and the women who serve them. The women's use of the pleasure trade for class advancement fails to bestow on them a clear class identity, be it the monied class or the working class. The distribution of the cultural signs of class thus works differently for the men who buy and the women who sell pleasure. There is an emerging powerful class of Vietnamese, identifiable by their direct and indirect access to the means of production and exchange in a market economy. They are Vietnam's state and private entrepreneurs. Their wealth has come from their position in the state, or connection therewith. A large part of this wealth comes hidden as it is illegally siphoned from the state sector. The murky and precarious possession of their wealth heightens the importance of their wearing the trappings of class. For this class of Vietnamese men, consuming pleasure using women is a convenient way to not only facilitate the generation of their wealth, but also to mark out their class. What is still missing from this formula is a native status that would differentiate Vietnamese entrepreneurs from foreign businessmen who frequent the most expensive pleasure places in Vietnam, a native status that would allow the Vietnamese men to display themselves on a separate class scale. To this we now turn.
Geography: Consuming the Native Land
The glory of past wars against the colonial and foreign capitalist world, the ideological superiority could no longer serve as an adequate Vietnamese identity in the face of a new foreign presence which provides the key to new prosperity. The signs of prosperity are pursued, but with a difference. The consumption of pleasure serves as both the signs of class and differentiation from foreign spending power. As this class of businessmen differentiate themselves from their foreign counterparts, the consumption of sexual pleasure takes on nativist expressions. The Vietnamese-ness commodified for domestic consumption, however, is not the Vietnamese high culture presented to the world. Rather, the folk ways of rurality become commodified in women's bodies for consumption by Vietnamese men.
There are now stretches of "eating and playing" on the highways connecting the cities to the small towns of rural and semi-rural Vietnam. Here, men can sample the local culinary specialties and local girls in ever more exotic forms. According to a Public Security newspaper, one stretch of highway, Song Cau, acquired its reputation
because here there are many specialty dishes (mon an dac san), from the marshes and the sea, that are fresh and delicious. And the red lights come on as night falls. The girls who attract customers to the food are young and agile, with powdered cheeks and colored lips, alluring enough to serve the "gods" as these reach the desired degree of bia om (Cong An Nhan Dan, 13 April 1996).
But why do we find this mixing of "eating" and "playing?" The women who sell pleasure refer to themselves in edible terms, as "a cake" that men who buy can eat as they see fit (Hang 19 May 1996). The men use the "food image" as a justification for "their desire for variety in sexual partners," (CARE AIDS Study, Franklin, 1993) and ever new ways of enjoying pleasure. This search for the exotic, nevertheless, hinges on an indigenous quality rather than calling forth the foreign. One writer, who has made a name for himself in the promotion of nativist knowledge, expounds on the "Vietnamese way" of eating and spending money (Son Nam, 1995). According to this writer, the Vietnamese are willing to pay a lot of money for exotic gustatory fares such as eels, frogs, snakes, various leaves and shoots because they have discovered these native offerings in the course of opening up the land.
Pleasure in women have been commodified precisely as distinctly local offerings to be tasted and appreciated as well. Much of this commodification geared to domestic consumption frames sex in native gustatory desire, as mon dac san, mat me (cool specialty dishes). This mixing of native food and sex bestows an air of rurality which has come to be seized upon as that which defines Vietnamese-ness. Cafes in the outskirts of Saigon promise hammocks, thatched huts, and "rice tantalizing girls of sixteen and seventeen" (Cong An Thanh Pho Ho Chi Minh 24 July 1996). Others in the city promise women for "country-outings" (CATPHCM 29 May 1996). There are plenty of orchard cafes and specialty restaurants that offer "hens with red claws" (prostitutes - seen as rural women with red nails) in the small towns which serve as resorts for the city. In the city itself, authentic rural dishes and simple pleasures in women are to be found deep in small alleys:
Saigonese who are connoisseurs of food and drink like to seek out and enjoy the culinary delights in the small alleys. Famous for the dishes of rice vermicelli and grilled pork, fried rolls is the Casino Alley. Intellectuals, prominent businessmen, and Viet Kieu [overseas Vietnamese] all know the reputation of the Nguyen Hue Alley with Mrs. Ca Doi's shop and her cold meat and pickled cabbage, her country spinach soup, her small pickled melons, her fermented shrimps, all cheap and delightful. If you're nursing some melancholy and want to empty out your sadness, you must stop by the alley of 220 Le Van Vy in District 3, classy and discreet, known for little sisters beautiful as a dream, who would entertain you by the hour just like the call girls (Cong An Nhan Dan 26 May 1996).8
It is a construction of the connoisseur-as-native. A restless search for what is authentically Vietnamese goes on in the inexhaustible depth of an interior inscribed on the surface of the country's geography. A Vietnamese, one is told, can roam the lush countryside and its connecting highways in search of this depth or find it embowelled within the city. All is to be unearthed and sold in the marketplace of pleasure.
The mixing of metaphors, the mingling of food and sex allow the performance of nativism in the act of food ingestion to be duplicated in the act of pleasure consumption using women. The women have come to embody this tie to the land, the consumption of which is an attempt at being native. But although this search for a Vietnamese essence amidst all the profound changes could be rendered comprehensible, the brutality of this act in its transformation of women into ingestible commodities is difficult to be overlooked. As ingestible commodities, many women in this trade feel stripped of a sense of subjectivity. Minh and Hang told me that among themselves, the bia om women would say they agree to serve the men with their "faces," and not with their "viscera": Bang mat chu khong bang long. The differentiation between a surface and an interior gives the women a sense of the possibility of preserving a core being beyond the reach of this objectification.
Anne McClintock has noted that in our times, "women are typically constructed as the symbolic bearers of the nation": "Singapore girl, you're a great way to fly" (1995:354). Similarly, travel publications on Vietnam typically feature the Vietnamese girl in the traditional dress and the long flowing hair, leaning against one dynastic tomb or another of the national landmarks. For the large part of the pleasure market geared to Vietnamese men, however, the women have come to typify the nation by embodying the locally exotic in rurality, inaccessible to foreign men who lack the taste/knowledge to enjoy it. This typification of Vietnamese-ness for Vietnamese, as opposed to the courtly motifs presented to the rest of the world, allows Vietnamese men to perform Vietnamese-ness in two ways. First, it ties them to the land and the history of the people who worked that land via the ingestion of local offerings. Second, it enables these men to assert difference through exclusive knowledge.
CONCLUSION
What I have tried to show is a process of commodifying the exotic for a class of Vietnamese men, integral to current economic practices during liberalization. It is a process predicated on difference: gender, class, nation. If the new rich in Vietnam started out getting their wealth through contacts with the outside world as Bach's study suggests, an emerging class of rich and powerful Vietnamese men has begun to differentiate itself. The Vietnamese men of means must be painfully aware of what Minh said had entered mundane daily exchanges: "Girls of seven and eight. The grown-ups would say, `Oh, she's pretty. Save her and marry her off to a Taiwanese or a Viet Kieu'" (19 May 1996). Phuong, a journalist covering prostitution for a large newspaper said resentfully that when he had to go undercover as a client to get his story at the expensive dance halls, he "would have to flaunt my money for those girls to even come to me, because I am obviously not foreign, and I don't have the looks and style of a Viet Kieu" (3 June 1996). Showing one's spending power at these expensive places is a statement of class parity with foreigners. But consuming the locally exotic beyond the pale of the foreigners separate the natives from outsiders altogether. The former, in their consumption of pleasure mark themselves as lords of their own domain, the essence of which is inaccessible to outsiders on their own. These repetitive acts of class and nation are performed around the gender difference between the women and the men who consume them. Women are in this way excluded from actively utilizing the commodified sexual pleasure in a construction of their national and class identity in a fierce process of social stratification going on in Vietnam.
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